W is for Walking

W is for Walking

Oh, I had no problem with this word! Walking saves my life. Walking keeps me in the world and in my art at the same time. And I am not alone! For years, in my work as a therapist, I have counseled clients to walk - walk for at least half an hour a day by yourself, in trees. Walk when you are fu#$%&!! up, when you are sad, angry, lonely, bereft. Walk in nature (everywhere has some trees except for some folks I worked with from an Arabian country!). Be quiet, even in your mind. Leave your walk-person at home. Listen to what is out there, feel the earth beneath your feet, the wind on your face. Smell the smells of the season you are in. Hear birds and kids and the ocean or traffic. Just be - walking.

“There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.” 
― Wendell Berry, Remembering

“Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.” 
― Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here?

“If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.”
― Charles Dickens

“I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.” 
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.” 
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” 
― Søren Kierkegaard

Here is my dear guy walking out the spit.