Walking is agreeing on the pace of presence / I have a contradiction living inside of me / “To have nothing, you must have nothing.” //
1.
Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility.
( Gary Snyder )
Walking is knowing your place.
Walking is agreeing on the pace of presence.
It’s the rhythm of detail.
The rhythm of meditation.
The repetitiveness of walking
equals the breath.
It’s life and death in every step.
It’s the primal memory of freedom.
It’s the primal memory of exposure.
Walking is following your feet
as they remember the trails.
It’s feeling my body in the larger body of soul.
When I walk, I belong to the land.
When I walk, I belong to its memory.
When I walk, I am home as a memory.
2.
I have a contradiction living inside of me.
I long for a life with the qualities of walking.
Time and detail and freedom and presence, and life and death in every step.
When I’m out on the moor, I often cry.
When I’m out in the forest, I often laugh.
When I’m out by the ocean, I often scream.
When I’m out by the river, I often write.
When I’m out, I sing.
My heart, it sings.
I long for life to be slow.
I also long for life to be as much as possible, as fast as possible.
Like Sylvia Plath wrote :
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
I feel so horribly limited.
And I often feel that when I’m walking.
It’s often then that I feel my greatest desire for life.
That ideas come faster than I can hold them.
That I see the many lives I want to step into.
The books I would like to read and write.
The skills I want to learn.
All the beauty I want to create and collect.
There are paths in every direction.
And I want to run toward everything at once.
Maybe this is the exact balance of spirit and humility Gary was talking about:
How to move forward one step at a time,
while feeling the unbearable magnitude of the world.
3.
Gary also wrote that great insights have come to some people
only after they reached the point where they have nothing:
“To have nothing, you must have nothing.”
Doing this work, being led here,
it keeps on stripping me naked.
Maybe this is what I need to give into.
To go from the experience of pilgrimage to being a pilgrim.
To move beyond the structures of this hysterical world.
To partner the wild,
To answer it, it might require me doing something really wild.
what will happen if i can’t pay rent
what will happen if i can’t pay for food
what will happen if i can’t pay for gas
I feel more found in nature as a home
rather than a place to visit
what does wild mean?
what does wildness mean?
what does wilderness mean?
To simply dwell on this earth.
To nod and acknowledge the plants, the trees, the rocks.
To simply dwell on this earth,
treading a memory into the soil with the souls of my feet.
