Bayview Dunes: A Taoist Golf Fable

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(as of Feb 16, 2026 03:27:46 UTC – Details)

After leaving a long career in radio and television, a middle-aged narrator retreats to the coast, living alone near the sea and spending his mornings walking the beach and playing solitary rounds of golf. Golf, for him, is no longer competition but ritual — a way to move, to breathe, and to listen. Each swing becomes a form of meditation, shaped by Taoist ideas of effortless action and attention without force.

His solitude is interrupted when he meets Jun, a quiet, enigmatic man who appears one fog-covered morning on the beach. Jun is neither teacher nor disciple in the conventional sense, but something stranger and more precise: a mirror. As they walk the course together, Jun’s observations — sparse, patient, and often disarming — begin to unsettle the narrator’s assumptions about control, striving, and mastery.

Each chapter unfolds across a single hole of the golf course, using the physical realities of the game — grip, wind, lies, lost balls, and missed putts — as entry points into deeper reflection. The narrative moves fluidly between the present round, memories of the narrator’s past, and lessons drawn from Taoist philosophy, particularly the tension between effort and surrender, naming and knowing, searching and seeing.

As the round progresses, long-buried memories surface: childhood exclusion, the ache of not belonging, the habit of proving worth through performance. Golf, once a refuge, is revealed as both teacher and trickster — exposing what the narrator tries to control and what he fears to release. Jun never lectures or corrects. Instead, he walks, watches, and occasionally asks the one question that cannot be avoided.

By the end of the day, the game itself recedes into the background. What remains is not enlightenment or resolution, but something quieter and more durable: an easing of resistance, a willingness to let motion happen without forcing meaning onto it. Bayview Dunes is a novel about walking rather than arriving, about practice rather than perfection, and about learning to trust what appears when striving falls away.

Lyrical, grounded, and unsentimental, the book blends literary fiction, philosophy, and the lived textures of golf and coastal life into a contemplative story about how we meet ourselves when no one is watching — and what becomes possible when we stop trying to win our way through the world.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GL1ZDHNR
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 1 February 2026
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 293 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8246422878
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 449 g
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 13 – 18 years
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 1.88 x 21.59 cm