Shanks Pony

I walk in all seasons, which here in Indiana number a trusty four. 

I walk in all emotional states. Sometimes to celebrate them. Sometimes to mend them. Sometimes simply to experience them.

Sometimes, as I walk, I pray.  

Sometimes too, as I walk, I cast my thoughts beyond my immediate experience, by means of memory. Thus to walk in different directions over the landscape, can also be to walk to different venues and destinations in time. 

People do not estimate highly enough the freedom there is to be had and enjoyed in walking. They consider the automobile a symbol of freedom. But in terms of choice of vector of motion, the freedom that a car can give us is slight. In a car, your movements are limited to the road itself. But to walk is generally to be free of such restrictive straight-line proscriptions, and straight lines, by the way, are unnatural. There are no straight lines in nature. Only the human mind imposes straight lines, and a profusion of them is inevitably tied up in natural destruction. Witness logging roads. Or the modern, machine-plowed mono-culture farm-field. 

It is said that walking is really a perpetual falling forward, which we arrest again and again with each laying down of the foot. Thus our feet prove to be something akin to guardian angels, that protect us time and again from harm with a knowledge and a timing all their own. By giving ourselves up to their protection we make self-locomotive progress: a kind of daily example of incarnational Grace.

I walk to two libraries here in town. I walk to church. I walk to the university campus for lectures and recitals. I walk to rehearsals as well as to coffee shops and cafes to meet with friends. I walk to concerts, and I walk back home humming whatever tunes linger--the last bright leaves hanging on the tree of the immediate musical mind. On many mornings I walk my wife to work, and in the afternoons, walk her back home as we talk over our respective days, and what was accomplished, and what setbacks we experienced, and what moments of enlightenment. I walk to the barber, and return home minimally lighter. I walk to the grocery and return more heavy-laden. I walk to the park. I walk through the park. I crisscross the park, sometimes touching the trees as if playing (with rooted beings) an unfair form of tag, but really blessing them. I walk down the block to my brother-in-law's, where the family vegetable garden flourishes, and return with radishes and lettuces and whatever else may be in season and delectable. Occasionally, it's true, all this walking represents itself to my impatient mind as a slow, duty-motivated chore, but for the most part, I walk without regret, and even prize the task. My heart is the lighter for it. My body the better exercised. My conscience clear of carbon. 

Note: It cannot be emphasized enough that a nine volt nomad, when walking, need not have in mind, or even pretend to have in mind, an immediate destination. In fact, for a nine volt nomad, the greatest pedestrian pleasure is often achieved with no destination in mind at all. Destination is so often tied to ambition and achievement, which should have as little place as possible in a low-voltage mental realm. Thus setting aside obvious goals in our ambulatory activities underlines our resistance to many of society's most overweening faults, among them hubris, naiive belief in the inevitability of progress, and optimism without reasonable cause.

But more on the matter of destinations later. The subject of the practical uses of walking (of which destination of course must be an integral part) deserves a post of its own someday, since I lump it in with a theme that requires deep and sustained reflection: to wit, the matter of physical labor, and our present-day disrespect for it. Our society's favoring of convenience over self-reliance, its death dance with complexity, and fixation on the machine.  The Hubbert curve in the years ahead will wean us from much of this, to the accompaniment of much wailing and grief. So why not live ahead of that curve? Why not, in the proleptic vanguard of adaptation, learn again to walk with joy?

For now though, to doggedly pursue my present course, I wish to enumerate what it is that, on my walks, strolls, walkabouts, and hikes, I encounter and experience. And here, out of a desire to cultivate my wit, I intend to strive for manful concision. After all, our mortal nature, both as readers and writers, is an issue to consider. And besides, I seek the throne of a toadstool in the electric garden of wit...and wit dear readers is a nine-volt virtue par excellence. Nothing thrives more on abridgement and concision than wit. Nothing shines more bright on less, except perhaps children at play, otters of all ages, and baby foxes. 

Then what, to wit, as I walk, do I encounter both by habit and by chance? Well, to start with, sadly I encounter specimens of the automobile, some in farty motion, others thank God at least for the moment in a state of silent park. As little must be said about these as possible, if I am to keep my wit, for I do not look kindly on cars, given that they deprive the world of walkers, and in a host of other ways render me irredeemably grumpy. 

So to proceed. Objects of interest visible on my walks include the many homes of my neighborhood:  some of which are intended for humans, and others of which--martin houses, dog houses, robins' nests, and cold frames--are not. Regularly on my outings, I also sight ground-holes into which chipmunks and groundhogs will scurry, sometimes at speeds that suggest the hole is vacuuming them in. I also have witnessed raccoons and opossums taking refuge in the city sewers.  

I see flowers in great variety. I see trees, including my favorite native species, the dogwood--which in the springtime features flowers that really look like flowers, unlike say the maple, whose flowers are difficult to accept as flowers because they are so small and un-bloomy. I prefer my flowers large enough to be capable of gesture. 

When out on a walk I consistently wear a red backpack. This backpack serves not only to contain items that I wish to carry with me--apples or whiskey or volumes of James--but also to attract the attention of members of the public to my low-voltage but nevertheless mysteriously bright existence, a brightness produced in part (I am convinced) by the rubbing of my shanks against one another while in my pedestrian state, which you see imparts a sort of static electrical polish to my physical aura, an ambient electrical charge that surrounds me as with a halo of light. Call it the Ambulatory Aurora, after the goddess of dawn, who herself is clearly a pedestrian. For evidence of which I note that Horatio, Hamlet's good friend, informs us that "...the morn, in russet mantle clad/Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill." 

Mark you--"walks!" To walk is to mirror the morning. To walk is to model the dawn.

Walk to feel of the wind on your face. Walk to greet the sun. Walk if you dare with saints and visionary companions. I have for instance walked mile after mile with William Blake, a most marvelous and indefatigable walker, and a fine conversationalist about matters both infinite and eternal, though I must also mention that some of the dead who have offered to walk with me, I have had to refuse, as being the same tiresome ambitious bores in death as they were in life. Once for instance, I was forced to chase off Thomas Edison with a large stick, because he kept dogging me at my heels, arguing the case for infrastructural DC current. "Give it up man," I said. But he was unable to listen, for even in the regions of the dead (where by the way Tesla his great rival is universally celebrated) he has not bothered to purchase a hearing aid, being so egotistical that he cannot take part in mutual conversation with any other being, much less bear to hear his rival praised.  

Above all I walk for sanity. You see, as a nine volt nomad, sanity is always my first business, and practically my sovereign vocational goal. Sanity is why Jesus periodically got away to pray, and Thoreau went to Walden, and Buddha sat beneath the boddhi tree. Yes, walking is my boddhi tree. My cabin of logs and wattle. My daily wilderness away. Paradoxically it's the outer motion involved in the act that imparts the requisite inner sense of stillness, as the hurricane both generates and harbors the eye. And though my feet and legs and arms may be in motion, the inward remainder is still and calm. And the best of me can think.

HB