Nomadic Westward

It has been a long time since I last posted anything. My previous piece came out in June 2021; somehow, more than a year and a half has passed. Many times during that stretch I wanted to write, only to stop short. There was plenty I wanted to say, but in the end I deleted it all. Even to me, the words felt strained and self-conscious.

Since the winter of 2021, I have not taken a single journey that felt like a journey. Each time hope returned, it was extinguished again, and with it went another measure of enthusiasm. In 2019, I began exploring the Roof of the World. I was full of purpose then, determined to visit every little-known corner of Qinghai and to understand, as best I could, the place I called home. By 2022, home was telling me, “Don’t come back just yet. If you do, you’ll have to quarantine for a week.” I had been in low-risk areas all along. All I wanted was to wander westward—to move freely through the mountains, rivers and lakes of home, and to marvel at the land before me. Nothing more.

This piece is really an announcement that I have renamed the account: from Dot Photography to Nomadic Westward. The name has moved from the specific to the abstract, and the account from photography alone toward something broader. Nomadic Westward—向西游牧—is a longing for home, a love of one’s native land, a yearning for freedom, an appetite for life, an act of defiance against reality, a hope for the future and a promise to family.

For those of us who live far from home, anywhere we go is a kind of wandering. Yet whenever I stand in the evening light, I look west. I see the road stretching into the distance. I remember the gesang flowers by the river. And I imagine that one day, I might roam the West freely.