In telling me
about her recent international journey, a friend mentioned how much she had
walked around that warring country abroad. I heard the word “walk” and it
captured me.
Powerful,
evocative, one small simple word, a daily mantra – “I walked the dog…around the
block…for three miles…around the forested villages.” Suddenly I saw snapshots of myself walking in Australia, Burma, my
old rural neighborhood…moving through landscapes known and foreign, fueling my tired
body with the delight of new encounter.
The breeze moves on my forearms; the heat
from black summer pavement swirls across my ankles; the bay peeks out from a
slot-of-a-view between the blue glass high rise and the centuries-old
cathedral; a boy of thirteen stands on a corner near the famous temple
clutching his bayonet; a swarm clings to my t-shirt, shorts and arms, a new
hatch of sticky gnats looking for home as I pass by; the
wall of sweet incense hits me, a thick perfume that roots into my hair and
clothes. Candles flicker - on the dark monastery altar, from the menorah in a
wintry window, through a cozy restaurant doorway, from the bedside of a dying
loved one, in the island home during a power outage, through the village as the
processional moves past, winding up the mountain to the summit, through the
parchment of the luminary-lit street… Walking is a blessing. It is full of
surprises. It is not something I take for granted, but wonder how I could live
without it. I am free to walk briskly or meanderingly, locally or abroad, in solitude,
or in friendly gaiety. I can see the same image in a myriad of forms. Or ponder
something inconceivable facing me at the intersection.
Even in this
now-familiar landscape where I live, there is nearly always something novel
that emerges creative and worthy of investigation, as we amble the streets and
paths of this small city.
And the power of
the outdoors - of landscape, grass or community, ritual, scent, insurrection and
fear, of sisterhood and friendship, romance, the sacred, meditation - converges in the seemingly ordinary act of simply walking. It is a miracle, being able to
walk…All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
