My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

When you walk a tightrope, you don't want to be eating buttered popcorn.

They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was touched, because he wouldn't have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

Let your walk be wisely so that you can inspire others to walk wisely!

Fairies with gossamer wings, Bring forth beauty, grace and joyful things. Fairies of the earth are caretakers of our soil, water and trees,They watch over beautiful creatures such as bears, bunnies and bees.Fairies ask that you breathe in and appreciate the vantage point from which you stand,Then trod carefully and respectfully with each intentional step you make across this beautiful land.

The average human being is actually quite bad at predicting what he or she should do in order to be happier, and this inability to predict keeps people from, well, being happier. In fact, psychologist Daniel Gilbert has made a career out of demonstrating that human beings are downright awful at predicting their own likes and dislikes. For example, most research subjects strongly believe that another $30,000 a year in income would make them much happier. And they feel equally strongly that adding a 30-minute walk to their daily routine would be of trivial import. And yet Dr. Gilbert’s research suggests that the added income is far less likely to produce an increase in happiness than the addition of a regular walk.

Yesterday it was sun outside. The sky was blue and people were lying under blooming cherry trees in the park. It was Friday, so records were released, that people have been working on for years. Friends around me find success and level up, do fancy photo shoots and get featured on big, white, movie screens. There were parties and lovers, hand in hand, laughing perfectly loud,but I walked numbly through the park, round and round, 40 times for 4 hoursjust wanting to make it through the day.There's a weight that inhabits my chest some times. Like a lock in my throat, making it hard to breathe. A little less air got throughand the sky was so blue I couldn’t look at it because it made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories,but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest. Tears falling on the desktick tick tickme not making a soundand some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind,but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine.This is not beautiful. This is not useful. You can not do anything with it and it tries to control you, throw you off your balance and lovely waysbut you can not let it.I cleaned up. Took myself for a walk. Tried to keep my eyes on the sky. Stayed away from the alcohol, stayed away from the destructive tools we learn to use. the smoking and the starving, the running, the madness,thinking it will help but it only feeds the fireand I don't want to hurt myself anymore.I made it through and today I woke up, lighter and proud because I'm still here. There are flowers growing outside my window. The coffee is warm, the air is pure. In a few hours I'll be on a train on my way to sing for people who invited me to come, to sing, for them. My own songs, that I created. Me—little me. From nowhere at all. And I have people around that I like and can laugh with, and it's spring again. It will always be spring again.And there will always be a new day.

I thank God every day for this life, and I want there to be more, though that’s not known. What is known is that I’m alive today, this minute. And that’s pretty much what we all have – this day, this moment.

We all die. Not all of us live.

If I’ve learned anything from facing death, it is that life is not meant to be survived. Life is the greatest adventure there is. And why stop your adventuring when someone says the end may be near? The truth is, we never know when the end will actually come. None of us will avoid it forever. What’s the point in trying? Live fearlessly!

I am fighting to stay alive not because I fear death, but because I love life.

Acceptance of death and cancer did not mean I intended to give up, just the opposite. I was prepared to fight cancer not out of fear of dying, but out of joy of living.

Through the Grace of God and His medicine I am healed.” The prayer was accompanied by a vision straight out of Braveheart, a line of Scottish Highland warriors in kilts with huge shields and long spears marching in brave unison and attacking and killing the cancer. They were advancing, towards the cancer, striking and killing it with strong accurate thrusts from their sharp spears. The vision was so strong I could hear marching feet, and visibly see the cancer in me dying. “Through the Grace of God and His medicine I am healed,” became my constant prayer. The prayer awakened with me each day, coming on the wings of the morning. It followed in my heart through the day, and was on my lips as I drifted to sleep at night.

When I put down Lance Armstrong’s book, I understood something profoundly. Edie, if you can move, you’re not sick. I decided right then and there that no matter what cancer did to me I would continue to move. Movement was what the physical body was designed to do; it was how it coped and functioned. Movement was vitality. It was life.I would move. Always. No matter what. Until my last breath, I would move.

When I put down Lance Armstrong’s book, I understood something profoundly. Edie, if you can move, you’re not sick. I decided right then and there that no matter what cancer did to me I would continue to move. Movement was what the physical body was designed to do; it was how it coped and functioned. Movement was vitality. It was life. I would move. Always. No matter what. Until my last breath, I would move.

I started to walk the day I was told I was dying of cancer. I believe walking has kept me alive. I live with a constant, pressing awareness of death. Once I start to walk, I am not afraid anymore; all is well.

I walk to rid myself of the terror of cancer, and to overcome the fear of it coming back. The fear may never completely fade, but actively engaging life – whatever that may involve – reminds me of the joy each day can bring.

I love to walk. Walking is a spiritual journey and a reflection of living. Each of us must determine which path to take and how far to walk; we must find our own way, what is right for one may not be for another. There is no single right way to deal with late stage cancer, to live life or approach death, or to walk an old mission trail.

Walking through darkness with thoughts full of colors".

Yes, alive,” said Fudge. “That is — I don’t know — is a man alive if he can’t be killed? I don’t really understand it, and Dumbledore won’t explain properly — but anyway, he’s certainly got a body and is walking and talking and killing, so I suppose, for the purposes of our discussion, yes, he’s alive.

6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeAnother vagabond lost to love.4am alone and on my way.These are my finest moments.I scrub my skinto rid me from youand I still don’t know why I cried.It was just something in the way you took my heart and rearranged my insides and I couldn’t recognise the emptiness you left me with when you were done. Maybe you thought my insides would fit better this way, look better this way, to you and us and all the rest.But then you must have changed your mindor made a wrongbecause why did youleave?6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.I replace cafés with crowded bars and empty roads with broken bottlesand this town is healing me slowly but still not slow or fast enough because there’s no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.

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.

If you seek creative ideas go walking.Angels whisper to a man when he goes fora walk.

If you can't write, read.If you can't read, walk.Or walk and read, then write.

Solitary walks are great for getting new ideas. It's like you're in a video game and you pick up idea coins on the way.

Flying is for the birds, the sugar gliders and the dreamers.Running is for the emus, the ostriches and the optimists.Walking is for the snails, the lame and the cautious explorer.All that is left are those who are afraid of the night, afraid of commitment, afraid of success and afraid of taking a chance in life.Luckily, I love to soar above the clouds, through the heavens, and journey to far distant galaxies and universes.

You have to go head, even if no one goes with you.

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.

I wish to walk and keep the ways of God

The boring thing with taking a walk with someone is that your thoughts are then dictated by the subject or subjects of your conversation and that is made worse by the fact that most sane people are terrified of silence whenever they are with or near someone.

I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day and you must build your own.

When real people fall down in life, they get right back up and keep on walking.

An invitation of a beautiful street is an invitation to walk within a dream!

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

As I went walking I saw a sign thereAnd on the sign it said "No Trespassing."But on the other side it didn't say nothing,That side was made for you and me.This land is your land, this land is my landFrom California to the New York islandFrom the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream watersThis land was made for you and me.

One day, it will all make sense, it will all be revealed. Until then, we learn to live and accept our shadows, our Déjà vu's, our dreams, our intuition that takes us to places that our minds never conceived, our bodies only perceived and our souls gladly remembered. Conversations and experiences amuse me, for I am experimenting with my feelings in ways that I can only do down here. Language makes up for a very interesting, yet bizarre way of putting thoughts into spoken form for the sound to move on in other peoples' ears, but every language, every sound, every word carries with it a long history, a deep culture and the souls of the many people who have previously used it throughout the centuries. Our hearts give us direction, hope and the passion to keep moving forward.. But what we do when they're frozen, broken, torn apart by an unhealthy way of living is what gives us new strength to push forward or kills us completely. Deep inside, we feed the entities that empower the fight between our internal demons and angels. We feed them with our thoughts, our emotions, our self-talk and the external talk that we lower our shields to at times. Whether good or bad, this brings about a change internally and at times there isn't much we can do to protect ourselves. At times, we need to let things be and go along with it. Of course, we're all worried, stressed, confused and lacking direction at times and we're in the same way at peace, stable and walking in the right direction once we get things sorted. Give it some time, give it some light, give it some love. You're not very far away.

The Native Americans, whose wisdom Thoreau admired, regarded the Earth itself as a sacred source of energy. To stretch out on it brought repose, to sit on the ground ensured greater wisdom in councils, to walk in contact with its gravity gave strength and endurance. The Earth was an inexhaustible well of strength: because it was the original Mother, the feeder, but also because it enclosed in its bosom all the dead ancestors. It was the element in which transmission took place. Thus, instead of stretching their hands skyward to implore the mercy of celestial divinities, American Indians preferred to walk barefoot on the Earth: The Lakota was a true Naturist – a lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest on the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. Walking, by virtue of having the earth’s support, feeling its gravity, resting on it with every step, is very like a continuous breathing in of energy. But the earth’s force is not transmitted only in the manner of a radiation climbing through the legs. It is also through the coincidence of circulations: walking is movement, the heart beats more strongly, with a more ample beat, the blood circulates faster and more powerfully than when the body is at rest. And the earth’s rhythms draw that along, they echo and respond to each other. A last source of energy, after the heart and the Earth, is landscapes. They summon the walker and make him at home: the hills, the colours, the trees all confirm it. The charm of a twisting path among hills, the beauty of vine fields in autumn, like purple and gold scarves, the silvery glitter of olive leaves against a defining summer sky, the immensity of perfectly sliced glaciers … all these things support, transport and nourish us.

None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.

Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints…

Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship.

Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears. You feel the silence as if it were a great fresh wind blowing away clouds. There’s the silence of woodland. Clumps and groves of trees form shifting, uncertain walls around us. We walk along existing paths, narrow winding strips of beaten earth. We quickly lose our sense of direction. That silence is tremulous, uneasy. Then there’s the silence of tough summer afternoon walks across the flank of a mountain, stony paths, exposed to an uncompromising sun.

This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.

Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn’t break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world’s presence palpable and keep time with it. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.

An author who composes while walking, on the other hand, is free from such bonds; his thought is not the slave of other volumes, not swollen with verifications, nor weighted with the thought of others. It contains no explanation owed to anyone: just thought, judgement, decision. It is thought born of a movement, an impulse. In it we can feel the body’s elasticity, the rhythm of a dance. It retains and expresses the energy, the springiness of the body. Here is thought about the thing itself, without the scrambling, the fogginess, the barriers, the customs clearances of culture and tradition. The result will not be long and meticulous exegesis, but thoughts that are light and profound. That is really the challenge: the lighter a thought, the more it rises, and becomes profound by rising – vertiginously – above the thick marshes of conviction, opinion, established thought. While books conceived in the library are on the contrary superficial and heavy. They remain on the level of recopying.

Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.

the joy of walking and feeling the body advancing ‘like a man alone’; the fullness of feeling alive. And then happiness, before the spectacle of a violet-shadowed valley below the beams of the setting sun, that miracle of summer evenings, when for a few minutes every shade of colour, flattened all day by a steely sun, is brought out at last by the golden light, and breathes. Happiness can come later, at the guesthouse, in the company of others staying there: people met there, happy to find themselves together for a moment through chance. But all of that involves receiving.

Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an energy that is deftly deployed, it is a free affirmation: everything comes easy. Joy is an activity: executing with ease something difficult that has taken time to master, asserting the faculties of the mind and the body. Joys of thought when it finds and discovers, joys of the body when it achieves without effort. That is why joy, unlike pleasure, increases with repetition, and is enriched. When you are walking, joy is a basso continuo. Locally, of course, you may run into effort and difficulty. You will also find immediate moments of contentment: a proud gaze backwards to contemplate the long steep plunge of the slope behind you. Those satisfactions, though, too often present an opportunity to reintroduce quantities, scores, figures (which track? how long? what altitude?). And walking becomes a competition. That is why expeditions in high mountain country (conquering peaks, each one a challenge) are always slightly impure: because they give rise to narcissistic gratification. What dominates in walking, away from ostentation and showing off, is the simple joy of feeling your body in the most primitively natural activity.

When walking in this mode we discover the immense vigour of starry night skies, elemental energies, and our appetites follow: they are enormous, and our bodies are satisfied. When you have slammed the world’s door, there is nothing left to hold you: pavements no longer guide your steps (the path, a hundred thousand times repeated, of the return to the fold). Crossroads shimmer like hesitant stars, you rediscover the tremulous fear of choosing, a vertiginous freedom.

Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. There’s the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly. There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses.

But just a vibration among the trees and stones, on the paths. Walking to breathe in the landscape. Every step an inspiration born to die immediately, well beyond the oeuvre. I like to walk at my ease, and to stop when I like. A wandering life is what I want. To walk through a beautiful country in fine weather, without being obliged to hurry, and with a pleasant prospect at the end, is of all kinds of life the one most suited to my taste.

But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.

Thoreau: ‘The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.’ That is why walking leads to a total loss of interest in what is called – laughably no doubt – the ‘news’, one of whose main features is that it becomes old as soon as it is uttered. Once caught in the rhythm, Thoreau says, you are on the treadmill: you want to know what comes next. The real challenge, though, is not to know what has changed, but to get closer to what remains eternally new. So you should replace reading the morning papers with a walk. News items replace one another, become mixed up together, are repeated and forgotten. But the truth is that as soon as you start walking, all that noise, all those rumours, fade out. What’s new? Nothing: the calm eternity of things, endlessly renewed.

You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.

Perhaps the itinerant monks called ‘Gyrovagues’ were especially responsible for promoting this view of our condition as eternal strangers. They journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, without fixed abode, and they haven’t quite disappeared, even today: it seems there are still a handful tramping Mount Athos. They walk for their entire lives on narrow mountain paths, back and forth on a long repeated round, sleeping at nightfall wherever their feet have taken them; they spend their lives murmuring prayers on foot, walk all day without destination or goal, this way or that, taking branching paths at random, turning, returning, without going anywhere, illustrating through endless wandering their condition as permanent strangers in this profane world.

When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker’s body. The harmony of the two presences, like two strings in tune, each feeding off the vibration of the other, is like an endless relaunch. Eternal Recurrence is the unfolding in a continuous circle of the repetition of those two affirmations, the circular transformation of the vibration of the presences. The walker’s immobility facing that of the landscape … it is the very intensity of that co-presence that gives birth to an indefinite circularity of exchanges: I have always been here, tomorrow, contemplating this landscape.

forest paths – flat labyrinths – and gentle plains invite the walker’s body to softness, to languor. And memories arise like eddying mists. The air is more bracing with Nietzsche, and above all sharp, transparent. The thought is trenchant, the body wide awake, trembling.

Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role, are never lined up anywhere. But they measure all the rest. Our feet form a compass that has no useful function, apart from evaluating distance. The legs survey. Their stride constitutes a serviceable measurement.

In the history of walking, many experts considering him (Wordsworth) the authentic originator of the long expedition. He was the first – at a time (the late eighteenth century) when walking was the lot of the poor, vagabonds and highwaymen, not to mention travelling showmen and pedlars – to conceive of the walk as a poetic act, a communion with Nature, fulfilment of the body, contemplation of the landscape. Christopher Morley wrote of him that he was ‘one of the first to use his legs in the service of philosophy’.

And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself.

If I could walk one week, why not six? If I could walk to London, why not to Paris, to the Alps, to Jerusalem...I would show with money and a pair of strong boots you can get to Rome. Good-bye, all ye vampires of modern travel. Good-bye, insistent cab-men, and tip-loving porters. Good-bye, mis-directed luggage and dusty railway carriages...Good-bye, trains - punctual and unpunctual, I am your slave no longer. I am free. I am FREE.

Phileas Fogg, having shut the door of his house at half-past eleven, and having put his right foot before his left five hundred and seventy-five times, and his left foot before his right five hundred and seventy-six times, reached the Reform Club

Always walk as if you’re running late, it’s healthier.

Walking through life, we spend most of our energy choosing the right shoes.

Becoming God’s reflection first in our private life and walking before God creates a wonderful platform for us to be eligible to change a whole nation for God

I firmly believe that everyone deserves to live within walking distance of either beauty or convenience, if not both. (48)

But the beauty is in the walking -- we are betrayed by destinations.

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam’s waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam’s curse. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia.

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.

It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.The woods are acres of sticks: I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. “Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our pasts. Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present. From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt- older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath. But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.

Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. “He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach.

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella. You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air. You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are god- are you tired? Finished?

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world’s coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?

It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson’s Bay. It was as if the season’s colors were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the air poised. The dark night into which the year was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening, a new and necessary austerity, the sparer climate for which I longed. The shed trees were brittle and still, the creek light and cold, and my spirit holding its breath.

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back.A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.” And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “yes, that’s how it was then, that part there was called France.” I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes. We all ought to be able to conjure up sights like these at will, so that we can keep in mind the scope of texture’s motion in time.

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle… What I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecule’s loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate at the shape of the air at times. Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fjords, but the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail.

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one…The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

Where does your soul walk?

A person with low standards will forever be walking. A person with high standard will soon stop walking and start running. Later, they’ll soon stop running and start galloping. The next time you see him, he’s either flying or soaring.

If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.

...the act of remembering is imagined as a real act, that is, as a physical act: as walking...the means of retrieving the stored information was walking through the rooms like a visitor in a museum...to walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.

This is what is behind the special relationship between tale and travel, and, perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking. To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain that the author as guide - a guide one may not always agree with our trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere. I have have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into distances so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling.

The spirit of the way is surely there, in the wish to wander through the world in order to escape it and to find others where there is nobody.

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

Yes, if the stones that we walked on could talk, they would surely tell our story.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy. There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.

Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.

The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).

Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.

A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.

Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake…when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

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.

All things can be deadly to us, even the things made to serve us; as in nature walls can kill us, and stairs can kill us, if we do not walk circumspectly.

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality.

Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.

I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

Every step of the walk unburdens us of what we have just seen and thought while it simultaneously thrusts us into the previously unknown.

with each measured step,we knowthis earth is only as solidas we are.

We can stage our own act on the planet-build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils-but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds, for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds. We can only witness them-whoever they are. If we were not here, they would be songbirds falling in the forest. If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them. The show would play to an empty house, as do all those falling stars which fall in the daytime. That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.

...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.

I send thee, love, this upland flower I foundWhile wandering lonely with o'erclouded heart,Hid in a grey recess of rocky groundAmong the misty mountains far apart;And then I heard the wild wind's luring soundWhich whoso trusts, is healed of earthborn care,And watched the lofty ridges loom around,Yet yearned in vain their secret faith to share.When lo! the sudden sunlight, sparkling keen,Poured full upon the vales this glorious day,And bared the abiding mountain-tops serene,And swept the shifting vapour-wreaths away:Then with the hills' true heart my heart beat true,Heavens opened, cloud-thoughts vanished, and I knew.

The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry.

When you think this pain is all you deserve, you are right. You are the only one that can decide how long you will walk in hell.

He could tell by the way animals walked that they were keeping time to some kind of music. Maybe it was the song in their own hearts that they walked to.

Symphony starts when you walk together, feel the heart beats and understand the unspoken words.

Nothing much bothered you for a while and you kept walking like a silhouette through this town, saying hi’s and goodbyes, acting polite at all times. But there is no fire in your heart; you are not very concerned.

Daily walk in nature brings tranquility to one’s life.

I am not afraid to walk alone.

I will rather walk alone in the light than to live in the dark.

When I rest my feet my mind also ceases to function.

And that luck was only fate's cheating, giving an illusion of power. But that illusion lingered, and I became restless. I decided to act, to challenge fate. (...) I gained courage; every afternoon I walked a little farther. And one day I got there.

Your footsteps will have more to say about your spiritual life than knowledge attained.

The brevity of life is grace to walk on your own path.

When someone is walking beside us, we have more courage to walk into the unknown and to risk the dark and messy places in our journey.

You have the body of a god and the smile of a demon. I walk towards you, barefoot, a believer walking a religious path. I wrap my arms around your neck, a priest hugging his crucifix. I offer you my all. Burn me like incense. Let's make all the church bells in hell ring just for us.

In every step you take, keep your feet firmly on the ground.

Take a walk outside - it will serve you far more than pacing around in your mind.

Through life, I want to walk gently. I want to treat all of life – the earth and its people – with reverence. I want to remove my shoes in the presence of holy ground. As much as possible, I want to walk in peace.I want to walk lightly, even joyfully, through whatever days I am given. I want to laugh easily. I want to step carefully in and out of people's lives and relationships. I don't want to tread any heavier than necessary.And throughout life, I think I would like to walk with more humility and less anger, more love and less fear. I want to walk confidently, but without arrogance. I want to walk in deep appreciation. I want to be genuinely thankful for life's extravagant, yet simple, gifts – a star-splattered night sky or a hot drink on an ice-cold day.If life is a journey, then how I make that journey is important. How I walk through life.

Walk with the Creator on the face of earth.

We walk alone in the wilderness.

Children of the light, walk in the light.

I was never afraid of the dark and I spent my youth walking through empty playgrounds at midnight, worried mothers telling girls to be careful and ”the world is an ugly place and not everyone wants you well”. But I was not afraid and I wished for adrenaline to make my veins pulsate in that way that puts them more on the outside of my skin than inside.After the first night with you I never walked alone at night again because suddenly I had something to lose. Something to save.

There are big advantages of living for God, therefore try to spend every minute you have walking with Him, listening to Him and learning of His wisdom

There is nothing more dreadful than having to go walking on one’s own on Monday.

It would be wise to define ‘living’ as walking in the fullest expression of who I am, verses wallowing in the confines of who I’m not.

A journey begins with a single step

The brevity of life is the grace to walk on your own path.

May the people walking in darkness see the dawn of a glorious light.

Leave the talking for others and live by walking. Go, go and go extra mile and you will be a true owner of what belongs to you

All that remains of the garden city in our own day are traffic-free enclaves, islands in a sea of traffic where the pedestrian leads a legally protected by languishing existence, comparable to that of the North American Indians on their reservations...In reality the modern urbanist regards the city as a gigantic centre of production, geared to the efficient transport of workers and goods, to the accommodation of people and the storage of wares, to industrial and commercial activity. The rest, that is to say creativity, life, is optional and comes under the heading of recreation and leisure activities.

When you are doing things for the right reasons, you do not need to play by the rules, because there are no rules for a creator walking the path of love.

Walking’s a great way to create. The ideas seem to fall from the sky sometimes, and the fresh air is great too.

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

He awaits himself while walking, out of the icy circle to escape.

If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur.

That (labyrinth)...became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when you're closest, sometimes the only way is the long one. After that careful walking and looking down, the stillness was deeply moving...It was breathtaking to realize that in the labyrinth, metaphors and meanings could be conveyed spatially. That when you seem farthest from your destination is when you suddenly arrive is a very pat truth in words, but a profound one to find with your feet.

You are not walking slow enough, when taking a walk, if you do not come across as bored or depressed (to the average sane person).

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.

Lord, set me a path by the side of the road.I pray this be a part of your plan,Then heap on the burden & pile on the load, And I'll trek it the best that I can.Please bless me with patience, Touch strength to my backThen cut me loose and I'll goJust like the burro toting his pack,The oxen ploughing his rowAnd once on this journey, a witness for YouToward thy way the Truth and the LightShine forth my countenance steady and trueFor the pathway to goodness and rightAnd lest I should falter And lest I should failLet all who know that I triedFor I am a bunglar, feeble & frailWhen You, dear Lord, I've deniedSo blessed be the day Your judgement comes dueAnd blessed by thy mercies bestowedAnd blessed be this journey, all praises to YouFor this path by the side of the road

Lord set me a path by the side of the road,Pray this be a part of your plan.Then heap on the burden and pile on the load'n I'll trek it the best that I can.Please bless me with patience; touch strength to my back;Then cut me loose and I'll go.Just like the burro totin' his pack,The oxen plowin' his row.And once on this journey, a witness for youTo'rd truth, thy way…and the light.Shine bright my countenance steady and true,O'er the pathway to goodness and right.And lest I should falter and lest I should fail,Let all who know that I tried.For I am a blunderer, feeble and frail,When you, dear Lord, I've denied.So blessed be the day your judgement comes due,And blessed be the mercy you showed.Oh blessed be this journey-all praises to youO'er this path by the side of the road.

From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. 'I can only meditate when I am walking,' wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the fourth book of his 'Confessions', 'when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.' Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself 'so overwhelmed with ideas' that he 'could scarcely walk'. Christopher Morley wrote of Wordsworth as 'employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy' and Wordsworth of his own 'feeling intellect'. Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject - 'Only those thoughts which come from 'walking' have a value' - and Wallace Stevens typically tentative: 'Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around the lake.' In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.

The keys to health and weight-loss: stress reduction, sleep, deep breathing, clean water, complete nutrition, sunshine, walking, stretching, meditation, love, community, laughter, dreams, perseverance, purpose, humility, action.

When you walk through the darkness, God shall be your light!.

Walking on the path I met my Master, known by a million names in different cultures and places yet people have forgotten the way to HIM.

What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object?

Cooper's tremendous love and energy and unchained freedom had captured life itself. Now, as the last shovelful covered him forever, I knew I would always carry a big piece of Cooper Half Malamute with me until I too was covered by the earth.

Walking with my doggy is so much fun! And she makes me laugh, she makes me run. Licking she likes to make some good new friends, Kindly enough with cyclists who spin with no end.

One kind of walking which I do not recall seeing mentioned anywhere in the literature of the subject is imaginary walking.

The most valuable lessons in life do not come when you are walking or running. They come when you fall down. You better take them and rise up!

What is the name of your dream? A lovely wooden cottage in the middle of a forest? Or walking in an endless autumn path? What is the name of your dream? Don’t give a name, always give a list! Fill yourself with dreams because dream is the path to reality!

Life is a journey

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.

So now it’s this thing I do.I go away, ever so often, by myself, for myself,to new places with foreign streets I haven’t walked yet,and there I wander, up and down, watching people going places I don’t knowand it always hits me that they’re never alone,always with someone,and I wonder how they would spend a day all on their own in a foreign city with nothing to do and no one to see,and I wonder if they’d be happy.Just simply being free,like I am trying to be.Happy.Just simply being me.

There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

If traveling was free, you'd never see me again.

It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.

[Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.

Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?

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

When I'm in turmoil, when I can't think, when I'm exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It's just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.

She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.

Who regulates the heat of the sun? Who pays the bills of the energy we obtain from the sun? Leave all judgments to that man if you believe we all walk under that same sun!

There were days when I still put on make up in case you’d come back,but I wear the same clothes and shower in the rainand eat when I can and sleep when I can,which is rare and not often,so if you’d see me nowon these streetswhere I once imagined walking with youyou’d have a hard time recognising me.I takes a lot to run away.

Since to follow a trail is to remember how it goes, making one's way in the present is itself a recollection of the past...onward movement is itself a return.

All of us learned how to walk by failing.

Aliganaya - 'the embraceduring an intoxicated walk'or 'sudden arousalwhile driving over speed bumps

Try to pause each day and take a walk to view nature.

We are but faint-hearted crusaders...our expeditions are but tours...half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walks, perchance, in the spirit of stirring adventure, never to return, --prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms...if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

Do you know how fast you are walking? ... To get a close estimate, count the number of steps you take in a minute and divide by 30... :)

No reprimand in the mirrorSlow walk to LiberiaSlow dance across the SaharaSlow unraveling of gray matter

They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.

To understand the journey you have to do the walking.

Talentless and incompetent as I am, there are two things I can do, and two things only: walk, with my own two feet; compose, composing my poems.

The way you walk is slash and burn.Like understatement's now a crime.

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

A man without a filter, is chaos walking

An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.

I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

Walking is also an ambulation of mind.

Let's take a walk. You can show me some of your memories and I'll show you some of mine.

I climb the door instead of a treeJust to crawl with myself walking freeWhat if I’m a lizard beneath my skinChanging my colours of the human I’ve been

Walk humbly with the Creator on earth.

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.

Some of the dairy people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed; noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the occassional laugh upon which her soul seemed to ride - the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves and has won from all other women - unlike anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which has not yet alighted.

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

It was a perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road (his home), the trees and hedges were dark bones and spindles against the skyline; yet now that he was out, and on his feet, it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows and exploded with growth. A canopy of sticky young leaves clung to the branches above him. There were startling yellow clouds of forsythia, trails of purple aubrietia; a young willow shook in a fountain of silver. The first of the potato shoots fingered through the soil, and already tiny buds hung from the gooseberry and currant shrubs like the earrings Maureen used to wear. The abundance of new life was enough to make him giddy.

There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.

There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

The stones were sharp,The wind came at my back;Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.

I might walk vast expansesof earth and always be beginningand I love beginningor could learnto love it.

someday i will walk under the soul-blossom tree with my hand eternally woven in yours.

Home is everything you can walk to.

a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.

One cannot walk in such regions, consciouslywithout enlargement of thought. There areheights and valleys which, to those who seekthem in a sympathetic spirit, are better" seats of learning " than any school or university in the land ; there are days when the climber seems to rise into a rarer mental as well as visual atmosphere, and to leave far below him the crass cares and prejudices of commonplace life.

It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes...For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity.

Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value

She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd.

Walkers easily travel three miles by foot. Drivers get in their cars to get from one side of the parking lot to the other. Neither quite understand why the other is so crazy, when it's so easy to do things their way.

Walk and loveWe're walking in loveFor the walk of love

I had a dream about you. You were so cute, and I was holding you for a long time. We went for a walk, happily strutting down the street. We saw a couple others but they weren’t having as much fun as we were. We arrived back home and I gave you a kiss on the nose and a bone.

Lord I am willing to walk with you, take my hand.

As the crow flies. That’s how she liked to walk. So what if she had nowhere to go? So what if no one on earth knew or probably cared where she was or when she’d get home? That wasn’t the point. It didn’t mean she had to take the long way. She was starting a new school in the morning, and she meant to put as much distance between herself and tomorrow as she could. Walking fast didn’t stop the earth’s slow roll, but sometimes it felt like it could.

The best thing is to walk on the right path without looking back, without knowing who is following you because you must walk with your own speed, with your own freedom! Your followers will catch you or your ideas somehow somewhere ahead, somewhere in time!

For pilgrims walking...every footfall is doubled, landing at once on the actual road and also on the path of faith.

Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Every thing is familiar, and everything is strange. It's as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal.

I’m fine, considering I can’t walk anymore,” Pam replied, a sarcastic edge in her voice. “You look like your bringing news. What is it this time, I’m blind?

Walking in a beautiful narrow street is an excellent way of discovering life with the feeling of security!

Your best walk is the one you walk with your own style! Imitating others means wiping out ourselves!

You are walking to Hope Springs?” “Yes, Your Grace.” “In this weather?” She glanced around and gave him a smile. “I haven’t any other weather to walk in.

When angels carry you they leave no footprints in the sand.

Angels walk among us, Sometimes the only thing we may not see are the wings upon their backs.

Has modern society lost a measure of its spiritual awareness because we take so little time to walk? In not allowing ourselves time to slow down, to be close to the earth around us, have we become impervious to a God who chooses to reveal Himself through His creation?

Some people just walk into our hearts.

Walking in the mountain with bare foot, Teasing the flowers with heavy soot, Touching the grasses, climbing the horses, swinging the girlsIt is joyful, jolly like the flying. Swimming in the rivers, tearing the clothes and burning the shoes Angel of the nature; counting the grasses, touching the flower, teasing the birds

They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.

I was moved beyond words. The train ride over the mountains from lake Titticaca to Cusco reminded me of Africa where I grew up; and 4 days walking on the Inca Trail, then more in the jungle, just magnificent - time, space, and splendour. Our planet is superb!

What if it's the thereand not the herethat I long for?The wanderand not the wait,the magicin the lost feetstumbling downthe faraway streetand the way the moonnever hangsquite the same.

I had a dream about you last night. In this dream we were walking down the beautiful Japanese streets of Florida. Fukuoka is nice in the summer.

Stop waiting and start working. Stop wishing and start walking.

Still, as much as I had experienced, there was more waiting to be found. I had started out with a feeling of burning dullness and desperation. Now I was filled with a thrill and expectation of new discovery.

The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.

Let us take our tongues and stick them out and waggle them in the wind. Let us walk, loving, let us walk and love, walking along, loving.

The longest walk of your life does not happen when you walk great distances lonely but it happens when you walk very shortly with the boring people!

Things that we do every day make up who we are and the results we have in our life. Bank accounts collect from constant deposits and good health is achieved or maintained from what we put into our bodies daily.

Crowds most envy the lonely man who walks confidently as if he is walking with the great crowds!

I walked and walked, sometimes with an objective- a friend's house, a shop, the church or school- but mostly at random, to outrun oppression.

When you run with the bulls,it's no use walking.

Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas.

The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all...There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything.

what does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside,' 'fragments of music and poetry,' in short, something like an 'uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, or being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.

Byproduct of the circulation of commodities, human circulation considered as a form of consumption, tourism comes down fundamentally to the freedom to go and see what has become banal. The economic planning of the frequenting of different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that has withdrawn the element of time from journeying, has also withdrawn the reality of space.

...the assessment of psychological drift, that is the way in which an undirected pedestrian tends to move about in a particular quarter of the town, tending to establish natural connections between places, the zones of influence of particular institutions and public services, and so forth. It may well be objected that these techniques are un-scientific, disorderly and too subjective, but the fact remains that the Situationists are studying the actual texture of towns and their relationship to human beings more intensively than most architects and in a more down-to-pavement manner than most town planners.

We are leading as thorough a study of 'alienation's positive pole' as of its negative pole. As a consequence of our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we are able to establish the world map of the extreme wealth of poverty. These speaking maps of a new topography will be in fact the first realization of 'human geography.' On them we will replace oil-deposits with the contours of layers of untapped pedestrian consciousness.

It's a strange city... filled with things that are not obvious.

Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur...These factors--the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations--remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.Eric Leed