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Walktober delights

Shall we do this again next year? (A sign on the boardwalk in Ocean City, MD on a misty day.)

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.

~ Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

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Walking with the Walktoberists

A map, to help us find the way. (A sandy topographic map in the Nature Center at Blackwater Falls State Park.)

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.

~ Jim Harrison, from After Ikkyū and Other Poems (Shambhala, 1996)

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Walktober 2020

A little earthiness.  (This is one of the biggest mushrooms I’ve ever seen around here.  I though it was fake at first.  There were several more scattered throughout the woods.)

SOLVITUR AMBULANDO.

This ancient Latin phrase loosely translates as “It is solved by walking.”  A walk is a journey that requires very little — neither planning nor passport, neither ticket nor equipment.  Nearly always at our disposal, a walk provides so much more than just a change of scenery.  Walking has helped me decide what is wise and what is foolhardy, has made me fall in love with a place, has batted away my melancholy.  Walking has helped me loosen the grip technology has on my life, giving me space and permission to disconnect from my devices that beg for my attention and feed my anxiety.  Most of all, walking has nurtured my creativity as I struggle to give tangible form to abstract ideas.

~ Bonnie Smith Whitehouse, in the introduction to Afoot and Lighthearted: A Journal for Mindful Walking

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Walktober 2018

Flipping the reflection. (Reflections on the pond at Pocomoke River State Park.)

The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories, and yet each walk is a little drama in itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes … and it is naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that form the staple of ordinary life.

~ Leslie Stephen

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