Barbarians At The Gate

In this episode, we welcome back to the podcast our good friend, Alec Ash, who has written a fascinating book recounting a year spent in the city of Dali, Yunan Province. Unlike Alec’s previous book, Wish Lanterns, his new book, The Mountains are High, is a highly personal account of his attempt to find solace and healing after a pivotal emotional crisis and his decision to disentangle himself from his urban Beijing life and escape to a simpler life in mountainous Yunnan Province. But Alec’s life in Dali was not completely hermitic. Quite the contrary, Alec found his new life interwoven with a peripatetic group of fellow escapees, a kaleidoscopic array of religious seekers, hippies, stoners, and disenchanted white-collar elites, all seeking solace or salvation through Buddhism, psychedelics, New Age mysticism, or just a simpler, more meaningful life. We discuss the process of writing the book, the challenge of living off the grid, the struggle to resist the distracting allure of the Internet, and the hard wor