Walking in the Landscape of the Mind

Because of my recent medical problems, I have not been actively walking since July of 2011.  I used to walk a minimum of 4 miles in the morning four days each week, and take longer hikes during the year.  I greatly miss this wonderful bodymind activity.  Walking and hiking have been an important part of my long life of 66 years.  I am hoping my podiatrist gives me the green light to resume walking outdoors and spin cycling indoors starting on February 1, 2012.  

Hiking involves such aspects of consciousness as determination, willpower, planning, strength, focus, endurance, adventure, and danger.   Just taking a long walk can also be an adventure for the mind, as well as an exercise of willpower. 

 

"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. The creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making."
- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

 

"Thoughts come clearly while one walks."
- Thomas Mann

 

"Walking inspires and promotes conversation that is grounded in the body, and so it gives the soul a place where it can thrive.  I think I could write an interesting memoir of significant walks I have taken with others, in which intimacy was not only experienced but set fondly into the landscape of memory.  When I was a child, I used to walk with my Uncle Tom on his farm, across fields and up and down hills.  We talked of many thing, some informative and some completely outrageous, and quite a few very tall stories emerged on those bucolic walks.  Whatever the content of the talking, those conversations remain important memories for me of my attachment to my family, to a remarkable personality, and to nature."
-   Thomas Moore, Soul Mates

  Ways of Walking

Walking Quotations

Way of the Short Staff

In the above photograph, I am standing on top of North Dome in Yosemite National Park.  Behind me is Half Dome.  My brother Philip and I hiked 12 miles round trip to get to the top of North Dome just four years ago in August.  A very memorable hike for us.  I am now planning a 2012 summer trip to the Olympic National Park in Washington, and making campground, lodge and motel reservations.