The Art of Walking

"Memory Found"  collage, 8"x8", by Donna Watson   SOLD

WANDERLUST by Rebecca Solnit

Walking is embodied presence in motion, presence at once with ourselves and with the world, inner and outer -- an active presence of body and mind...  from Brain Pickings by Maria Popova.

Rebecca Solnit speaks to this beautifully:

     "Walking, ideally is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.  Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.  It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts."  Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

This is a path near my home... it leads to the beach below my home on the cliff.

photo by Donna Watson

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts.  Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

This is a continuation of the path near my home.  Photo by Donna Watson

WALKING by Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau believed that 'sauntering" with no real destination in mind, was the best way to walk.

He wrote that the idea of sauntering should be approached with a mindset of presence rather than productivity.   "What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?"  Thoreau

Here we are taking a walk with our 6 month old puppy, Kirin.

"Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites.  To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking....  Here this history begins to become part of the history of the imagination and the culture, of what kind of pleasure, freedom, and meaning are pursued at different times by different kinds of walks and walkers."  Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

One of the paths over water, in a temple in Kyoto Japan

photo by Donna Watson

A street for walking through an older traditional part of Kyoto

photo by Donna Watson

"Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart.  It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing.  It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals."  Rebecca Solnit

Path by Maria Popova

Check out Brain Pickings by Maria Popova.  She publishes a weekly synopsis of books... musings... on wide ranging topics including love, grace, human spirit, art, literature, society, cultures, creativity, and on and on... she fills her musings with plenty of links and quotes...  she writes with authority as she links one book to another book, or idea or thought.  You can sign up to receive her newsletter via email.... or at Flipboard...  which I also highly recommend.   www.brainpickings.org

A Path

Donna Watson, acrylic collage painting, Imprint

"When you're lost in the woods, it sometimes takes you awhile to realize that you are lost.  For

the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trail head any moment now.  Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's difficult to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore."  Elizabeth Gilbert

   image by Donna Watson, Osaka Japan

"It may be that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.  The mind that is not baffled is not employed.  The impeded stream is the one that sings."

Wendell Berry

   image by Donna Watson, Kyoto Japan

"This is your road.  Only you will take it.  And there's no turning back."

Olav H. Hauge

image by Donna Watson, Kyoto Japan

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work

and when we no longer know which way to go, 

we have begun our real journey."

Wendell Berry

image by Donna Watson, Kyoto Japan

"You see, I want a lot.

Perhaps I want everything:

the darkness that comes with every infinite fall

and the shivering blaze of every step up."

Rilke

 image by Donna Watson, Nara Japan

"Will you rewalk that path with the stone lanterns

over and over again in dreams?

and wake to walk

the path you've created in your own temple?"

Nancy Neva Gagliano

           image by Donna Watson, Kyoto Japan

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

T. S. Eliot

  

"Every moment in your life is a turning and everyone a choosing.  Somewhere you made a choice.  All followed to this."  -- Cormac McCarthy