"With the first step, the number of shapes the walk might take is infinite, but then the walk begins to define itself "More backpacking trips are ruined by sore feet than by all other causes combined. . Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk." . And, hiking alone lets me have some time to myself.".
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In any Martial Art, the crucial factor is the game of legs, to walk with a perfect balance and grace. When the mastery in the skill of walking has been achieved, when you walk as a ninja , a silent, invisible walker, avoiding detection by moving carefully like a tanguero knife-fighter , a lower class samurai, it feels as if you are never touching the floor. In Argentine tango, the body energy-center lies lower than in ballroom tango. A little downwards pressure in the hips, makes the knees bend more and gives a more centered body axes, a sneaking, gliding way of walking.
This less royal way of moving is related to knife-fighting, which is a fast, fluid and dangerous affair. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. When my way is too rough for my feet, or too steep for my strength, I get off it, to some smooth velvet path which fancy has scattered over with rose-buds of delights; and have taken a few turns on it, come back strengthened and refreshed A History of Walking.
Love leads me on; for I can never still My trouble on the world's well beaten ways. Jerome was fond of saying. To solve a problem, walk around. You can hike for three hours and not even realize you're working out. And, hiking alone lets me have some time to myself.
Walking Quotes ( quotes)
There is always more to do than there is time. The landscape and even the light are mostly artificial. This can be exciting, but all too often it is frustrating, stressful, and exhausting. In contrast, hiking for weeks or months at a time in an unspoiled natural environment is a simple, repetitive activity that leads to calmness and psychological well-being, a feeling of wholeness, of being a complete person. Only the details are different. I get a great pleasure from this simplicity, from the basic pattern of walk and camp, walk and camp.
It is good to escape the rush of the modern world and for a period of time to live a quieter, more basic life.
Problems and worries subside as the days go by; they are put into perspective by the elemental activity of putting one foot in front of the other hour after hour, day after day. And on returning from the wilds, restored and revitalized by the experience, I find civilization can be much easier to deal with; indeed, aspects of it can seem very desirable. A walker is a man in possession of his soul. Don't walk behind me; I may not lead.
Just walk beside me and be my friend. Place is not simply location. A place is a profound individuality. With complete attention, landscape celebrates the liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly to the passion of the goddess. The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness.
Mountains are huge contemplatives. Rivers and streams offer voice; they are the tears of the earth's joy and despair. Civilization has tamed place. Left to itself, the curvature of the landscape invites presence and the loyalty of stillness. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much. Anyone knows they are. How can you say it is time your pulse responded to another rhythm, the rhythm of the day and the season instead of the hour and the minute?
Walking Quotes
No, you cannot explain. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking - one sport you shouldn't have to reserve a time and a court for. As difficult as that might seem, here's how to do it.
Make it a practice. Turn your walking into a vehicle for personal growth as well as for fitness. This will add a higher level of integrity and intention to your approach because you will find that it is a way to deepen and upgrade your relationship to your body. Instead of merely giving your legs and a good workout, you'll be practicing to relax more, to breathe better, to expand your vision, to open up your range of motion, to increase your energy, to feel and sense your body.
The list is exciting - and endless. With all of this to look forward to, your walking program will take its place alongside everything in your life you value most, and you'll be amazed at how easy it is to schedule time for something you really love to do. It is by walking this line between sacrifice and satisfaction that one finds fulfillment.
There was probably no compelling reason for Wordsworth and Dorothy to walk twice to the Black Swan or for Wordsworth and Mary to circumambulate the lakes. Indeed, the reasons given for some of the walks--mousetrap buying and letter fetching--seem a bit contrived, as if almost any excuse would do for the sake of a good walk.
Yet at the same time, Wordsworth was a poet adept at picking up poetic materials from those walks--a beggar, a leech gatherer, a field of flowers. Moreover, Wordsworth used walking as a compositional device, as he composed and revised his verses. In other words, for Wordsworth, walking was also a form of work, both a process for extracting raw materials from the world and a manufacturing method for shaping or refining those materials. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.
Those fit for walking through or being gazed upon are not equal to those in which one may dwell or ramble. It develops self-reliance and independence. Life then teems with excitement. There is stagnation only in security. Walk to the edge. Choose with no regret. Do what you love.
Live as if this is all there is. If you work for your possessions and they don't set you free, what are you working for? It helps to know that you can survive it. That's an education in itself. Concentration on one thing makes the mind pure. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes. It is the prescription without medicine, the weight control without diet, the cosmetic that is sold in no drugstore.
It is the tranquilizer without a pill, the therapy without a psychoanalyst, the fountain of youth that is no legend. A walk is the vacation that does not cost a cent. I sometimes think, in fact, that the nicest part of gardening is walking around in a daze, idly deadheading the odd dahlia, wondering where on earth to squeeze in yet another impulse buy, debating whether to move the recalcitrant artemisia one more time, or daydreaming about where to put the pergola. Here is my walking path.
Kilkenny Lane moves in an east-west direction from the front of my home to Highway 99 West. I practice Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong in the circular area in front of my house shown the foreground of this picture. I rarely encounter a car on Kilkenny Lane. Six laps back and forth provide me with 3.
It was a mind-altering drug we took daily. Today is your day. You're off to Great Places! You're off and away! You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own.
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And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go. You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care. About some you will say, "I don't choose to go there. And you may not find any you'll want to go down. In that case, of course, you'll head straight out of town. It's opener there in the wide open air.
Out there things can happen and frequently do to people as brainy and footsy as you. And when things start to happen, don't worry, Don't stew. Just go right along. You'll start happening too. You'll be on your way up! You'll be seeing great sights! You'll join the high fliers. You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed. You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead. Whenever you fly, you'll be best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest. Except when you don't. Because, sometimes, you won't. I'm sorry to say so but, sadly, it's true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you. You can get all hung up. And your gang will fly on. You'll be left in a Lurch. You'll come down from the Lerch with an unpleasant bump.
They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility. That I am still able to be here, I owe to a keen eye and a nimble pair of legs. But I know they'll get me someday. All is a miracle. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. The wander and not the wait, the magic in the lost feet stumbling down the faraway street and the way the moon never hangs quite the same. Poems from the Typewriter Series. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.
Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.
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This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York island From the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.
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Maybe it was the song in their own hearts that they walked to. 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: Always the same thing to do all day: 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. 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.
I was given three months to live There is immense satisfaction in that. Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast.