Why Do You Walk?

As I walk 3.6 miles in the morning, four days each week, I enjoy the interplay of all the senses and the kinesthetic exuberance of the flowing movement.  The scenery along my safe rural walking path is beautiful and changing with the seasons.  While walking, I mostly am just walking, and sometimes thinking, reflecting, contemplating, or meditating.  These experiences are something I treasure.  Walking is beneficial for my heart, and helps me keep my diabetes under control.  Walking is an integral component of my regular Sadhana ... my "spiritual" practices.  

"If you want to know if your brain is flabby, feel your legs." 
-  Bruce Barton   

"Think with your whole body."
-  Taisen Deshimaru

”If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you’d best begin with the Little Answers about your body.”
-  George Sheehan

"Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking .. questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world."
-  Honoré de Balzac, Theorie de la Demarché   

Walking: Quotations, Sayings, Facts, Lore, Poetry.  Compiled by Mike Garofalo.   

Somatic Practices for Health, Well-Being and Mindfulness

"Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains of the moon.

Roads go ever ever one
Under cloud and under star
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
An horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known."
-  J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit