“I am alive and the field is alive.” I’m reading this post today, Antonia, while noting and pondering an important shift in my relationship with the nonhuman world. Suffice it to say I’m attempting to learn to trust it a bit more, trust that it can hold me, and that I will not be swallowed by its deep suffering. I’m writing a piece about it to publish on Friday. Your example here of rejoicing in the world, while also noting its suffering and our suffering because, despite “no trespassing” signs, there is no separation, is very encouraging to me. Thank you!
Funnily enough, I accidentally deleted a few words in the last paragraph, which I only noticed when I was reading it aloud, and then didn't quite want to go back and redo the whole thing. It was that I knew the water dripping from my hair had microplastics and jet fuel residue and the legacies of tens of thousands of unregulated chemicals, but also the wolverine's footprint and the loon's call.
I kind of wish I'd gone back and corrected it, because it's important to remember that even with the damage, the incredible reality of this world is just as real, and cannot be denied. Which means it can be loved. 🧡 Looking forward to reading!
Thank you for sharing this part with me (although I totally understand not wanting to go back and do it over!). I really appreciate the counterpoint it provides. We hold/occupy both. We’re all mixed up in both (like the water in your hair). And we can choose to pay attention to that incredible reality as you say. Yes!
Nia, thank you for this meditative exploration of what it means to wander and why it is so important for all forms of life to be free to wander. Thank you for taking me where you are. That cabin sounds like the perfect place to heal.
The more I learn about ownership and commons, the more I realise what a privilege it is to be able to walk this world. And to walk a prayer is even more so. What would we ever do without Chris La Tray and his awakening of his ancestor’s love for that land. Thank you for honouring that Nia. 💜
I would love to take you to that cabin, or any of these places, and sit by these waters and just *be.*
It's an honor to honor Chris, so to speak. And a gift to walk with him in beautiful places in person, which I hold out hope you also can do someday. In the meantime, I am thinking of you finding places for your feet and heart to rest as you go through your own difficult journey -- one most of us face, but which is still so completely individual. 🧡
You are a starlight Nia. I needed the invitation to rest my feet somewhere my ancestors would have and there are many such places around since my family has been rooted here since their displacement from their homeland. I haven’t stepped out in the past few weeks but today I feel like to walk the old roads, to walk a prayer 💜
While I do so, I am going to send the thought to the universe to allow me to someday walk beside my friends in Montana.
I am so happy for you, for that, that you can rest your feet where your ancestors would have. Sometimes all we can do is take a step or two, even just out the door for one true breath of the world. It can be the most painful step after a loss like this, the first. The hardest. ❤️🩹
OMG, another stunning column, thanks. Saw my first mountain bluebirds on a hike last week, and Pasque flowers this week. Love the way your writing makes me feel, and makes me more and more want to just get out there. Thanks so much!
Thank you! I love the way the bluebirds make me feel -- always such a surprise and a delight to see, and what a gift to run into so many. More and more, I just want to get out there, too.
What a lovely poem. I'm off for a trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I'm bringing your book A Walking Life with me. (Unless I finish it tonight.) The irony of a national park that's a highway is not lost on me.
When I was in my mid-to-late teens I sometimes walked barefoot through the forest. I did not realize I was having a spiritual experience, but I see now that I was. I see now how walking barefoot changed everything, how being barefoot was the essence of the connection and the kinship I felt at the time to all of non-human nature, how it was the essence of the connection I felt to life itself.
There was a girl. We sometimes walked barefoot through the forest together. We talked and laughed and dreamed. We made a game of picking up small pinecones in our curled toes and tossing them as far as we could by kicking our feet. I don't remember which of us kicked the furthest or who was declared the winner, but all of these years later I still remember the kiss. I have never forgotten that kiss.
Sometime this evening, after the laundry is folded and all the troubles and worries of this world are put in their proper place, I will walk barefoot through the moonbeams and the memories. I will amble upstream until I feel those ancient waters swirling between my toes. There, I will look for the girl. Our eyes will meet and we will walk together once again. Barefoot. We will share our loves and our laughter, scattering them like seeds to blossom in some tomorrow that will only live in words and dreams. But we won't care. The kiss will live forever.
Ken, this poetry you share is invaluable. I want to copy and save every bit of it, and hope you are doing so yourself, for your daughters.
I have never been in the woods with someone who also wanted to walk barefoot, which feels like a serious lack in my life, though I think my younger kid is getting close. "Sometime this evening, after the laundry is folded and all the troubles and worries of this world are put in their proper place, I will walk barefoot through the moonbeams and the memories. I will amble upstream until I feel those ancient waters swirling between my toes. There, I will look for the girl." Pure poetry, I say again, and of the best kind that helps someone find themselves while alone in a cabin reading by firelight.
The more I do it, the more I do, indeed, think that walking barefoot is a spiritual experience. There is something about it that has started to become alive for me.
I hadn't thought about this part of my life in forever, but reading your essay brought it all to mind. It felt good to step outside this suffocating matrix for a few minutes.
We lose so much as we transition out of childhood. We individuate and disconnect from our Mother, from Earth, from the Whole. Then, after our souls have been realigned by absorbing the values and perspectives of the world we find ourselves thrown into (after all, we are memetic creatures), we spend our lives attempting to find connection in any number of counterfeits—culture, consumerism, possession, ideologies, cults, religions, romantic obsessions, etc. We forget the value of simply being. We forget the value of taking only what we need and being grateful for it. We forget the inestimable joys and connections that are everywhere to be found if only we might see through the eyes of the child we once were.
As with so much of your writing and thoughts, I am taken by what pure poetry is here. We forget to walk barefoot, and that means so much beyond its first implication. Perhaps one of our biggest gifts is if we're able to relearn.
“That’s where I’ve been hiding.” I needed this tonight:). Thank you again for the gift of your words, and for passing along the gift of those poems! I feel like I’ve been to church, nourished by the spiritual abundance you find when many voices come together in prayer. On my nightly walk my feet will be joining in.
I thought of you while I was writing this. You wrote before about not wanting a new faith or church, but the return of the commons. I felt that strongly while walking the trail barefoot. It feels like a birthright of being alive, to be able to walk wherever the land calls us.
Oh I love that! I think I felt the welcome directed toward me in this piece, at a time when i needed a welcome. My feelings about church are, of course, complicated. But lately I’ve really missed the sensation of my body being received weekly into a community. You know how in life (especially in motherhood, especially in the past month of motherhood for me) we encounter ourselves in so many forms—some so dark and shadowy we feel ourselves exiled from the human community. There’s something about the rhythm of being weekly received into a community that is restorative—that is necessary for holding all the parts of ourselves. My body misses that, and I’m holding this sensory longing as a sort of prayer. Because I do think it’s a desire that runs deeper than church—it doesn’t really belong to a capitalist community with a fantasy future. Holding it as prayer, our feet might lead us to hidden possibilities of belonging.
Online community provides only a meaningful fraction of the community my body needs (always vulnerable to capitalist exploitation), but somehow this piece provided a glimmer, a taste of the deep satisfaction I haven’t felt in a long time. Maybe I felt myself being thought in a moment I wasn’t making noise. Maybe I felt myself being received.
I'm so glad you felt the welcome! I certainly thought of you. And the sensation of your body being received weekly into a community (how beautifully put) is I think an ancient human desire. In fact, if I remember, I wrote something about that briefly in my book on walking, after walking around Norwich Cathedral in England. It's 900 years old and I thought about all the generations of people walking those floors in weekly services and the kind of community-building that answered. My answer is the potential of neighborhoods, but that has a long, long way to go, and I don't think at all replaces the need of shared ritual. I think you're absolutely right that it's a desire that runs deeper than church.
I love how you perceive things and then express them! It answers something in me, too.
Mmmm, yes, I do believe we pray through our feet, at least as one way of praying. This is beautifully written (as are all your posts). Just as birds sing with their whole bodies, I think we pray like that. Makes me think of that quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, “When we walk like (we are rushing), we print anxiety and sorrow on the earth. We have to walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the earth... Be aware of the contact between your feet and the earth. Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.”
These are wonderful thoughts on reading, on being at home with yourself, and…wonderful bluebirds. As you say an impossible blue. But what a beautiful impossibility made possible.
In Scandinavia the right to roam is intrinsic because of the instinctive bond with nature and the clear acceptance that being in it, being part of it, is essential for the the human spirit. You bring this out so clearly and well.
Yes! It's so important to remind those of us in private property-worshipping societies that it is possible for all humans to be able to roam our world, and share it, as in Scandinavia and Scotland. Thank you for the reminder.
Your writing is (as always) so beautiful. Each paragraph feels like a step further into a wild woods, until I find myself in a place I didn't know existed before I entered it. Your words about flowing water particularly struck me. My feet in the Sandy River once told me, finally, with no more doubt or hesitation, that I needed to leave my marriage. And I never wavered after. It was the cold, flowing water. It shifted something in me. I felt so cared for by it.
Ooh, I think we talked about that briefly before, didn't we? Not long ago. This might sound odd, but there is a lot about your story that makes me wish we could take a riverside walk together.
What a beautiful way to start the day. Thank you for the reminder to get outside!
Listening on my tablet and hearing the birds in the background, I opened up the Merlin app on my phone. It took about 2 seconds for it to confirm for me a black capped chickadee, a bird I hear here at home.
I'll spend part of the day today working on plans to relocate our community wells - a commons, of a sort - away from a planned housing development. This mess is, of course, rooted in private ownership of land. I'll write about it one day, but for now I'm too close to it.
Many thanks, Nia. This world would be a better place if more prayed with their feet. ❤️
It would indeed. Barefoot, we're all vulnerable, and perhaps more tender with one another because of it.
“I am alive and the field is alive.” I’m reading this post today, Antonia, while noting and pondering an important shift in my relationship with the nonhuman world. Suffice it to say I’m attempting to learn to trust it a bit more, trust that it can hold me, and that I will not be swallowed by its deep suffering. I’m writing a piece about it to publish on Friday. Your example here of rejoicing in the world, while also noting its suffering and our suffering because, despite “no trespassing” signs, there is no separation, is very encouraging to me. Thank you!
Funnily enough, I accidentally deleted a few words in the last paragraph, which I only noticed when I was reading it aloud, and then didn't quite want to go back and redo the whole thing. It was that I knew the water dripping from my hair had microplastics and jet fuel residue and the legacies of tens of thousands of unregulated chemicals, but also the wolverine's footprint and the loon's call.
I kind of wish I'd gone back and corrected it, because it's important to remember that even with the damage, the incredible reality of this world is just as real, and cannot be denied. Which means it can be loved. 🧡 Looking forward to reading!
Thank you for sharing this part with me (although I totally understand not wanting to go back and do it over!). I really appreciate the counterpoint it provides. We hold/occupy both. We’re all mixed up in both (like the water in your hair). And we can choose to pay attention to that incredible reality as you say. Yes!
No boundaries, no borders, in life as well as in pollution!
Yes! Ugh.
This was so lovely! I feel like I got to go on a hike with you. Thank you.
Thank you!
Nia, thank you for this meditative exploration of what it means to wander and why it is so important for all forms of life to be free to wander. Thank you for taking me where you are. That cabin sounds like the perfect place to heal.
The more I learn about ownership and commons, the more I realise what a privilege it is to be able to walk this world. And to walk a prayer is even more so. What would we ever do without Chris La Tray and his awakening of his ancestor’s love for that land. Thank you for honouring that Nia. 💜
I would love to take you to that cabin, or any of these places, and sit by these waters and just *be.*
It's an honor to honor Chris, so to speak. And a gift to walk with him in beautiful places in person, which I hold out hope you also can do someday. In the meantime, I am thinking of you finding places for your feet and heart to rest as you go through your own difficult journey -- one most of us face, but which is still so completely individual. 🧡
You are a starlight Nia. I needed the invitation to rest my feet somewhere my ancestors would have and there are many such places around since my family has been rooted here since their displacement from their homeland. I haven’t stepped out in the past few weeks but today I feel like to walk the old roads, to walk a prayer 💜
While I do so, I am going to send the thought to the universe to allow me to someday walk beside my friends in Montana.
I am so happy for you, for that, that you can rest your feet where your ancestors would have. Sometimes all we can do is take a step or two, even just out the door for one true breath of the world. It can be the most painful step after a loss like this, the first. The hardest. ❤️🩹
One step at a time ❤️🩹
And not alone. 💚
😔❤️🩹
Wonderful essay as ever. Loved the birdruckus in the audio!!!
I need to figure out how to really bring it through. The robins were so much louder even than the chickadees but barely came out!
What a balm. 🙏🏼
Thank you, Kelton! Our mountains call to one another.
OMG, another stunning column, thanks. Saw my first mountain bluebirds on a hike last week, and Pasque flowers this week. Love the way your writing makes me feel, and makes me more and more want to just get out there. Thanks so much!
Thank you! I love the way the bluebirds make me feel -- always such a surprise and a delight to see, and what a gift to run into so many. More and more, I just want to get out there, too.
This is all worthy of being savored, slowly. I love listening to you read it — and that last poem!
So many beauties in that book. I would like to send you a copy! I can, if you want to send me an address. 🧡
What a lovely poem. I'm off for a trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I'm bringing your book A Walking Life with me. (Unless I finish it tonight.) The irony of a national park that's a highway is not lost on me.
It's so beautiful there, though. And there are so many places in this land now, though, that I can't think of without thinking of Vyx's journey!
It is beautiful! And I finished your book, which I enjoyed greatly. I'm glad Vyx has stayed with you!
When I was in my mid-to-late teens I sometimes walked barefoot through the forest. I did not realize I was having a spiritual experience, but I see now that I was. I see now how walking barefoot changed everything, how being barefoot was the essence of the connection and the kinship I felt at the time to all of non-human nature, how it was the essence of the connection I felt to life itself.
There was a girl. We sometimes walked barefoot through the forest together. We talked and laughed and dreamed. We made a game of picking up small pinecones in our curled toes and tossing them as far as we could by kicking our feet. I don't remember which of us kicked the furthest or who was declared the winner, but all of these years later I still remember the kiss. I have never forgotten that kiss.
Sometime this evening, after the laundry is folded and all the troubles and worries of this world are put in their proper place, I will walk barefoot through the moonbeams and the memories. I will amble upstream until I feel those ancient waters swirling between my toes. There, I will look for the girl. Our eyes will meet and we will walk together once again. Barefoot. We will share our loves and our laughter, scattering them like seeds to blossom in some tomorrow that will only live in words and dreams. But we won't care. The kiss will live forever.
Ken, this poetry you share is invaluable. I want to copy and save every bit of it, and hope you are doing so yourself, for your daughters.
I have never been in the woods with someone who also wanted to walk barefoot, which feels like a serious lack in my life, though I think my younger kid is getting close. "Sometime this evening, after the laundry is folded and all the troubles and worries of this world are put in their proper place, I will walk barefoot through the moonbeams and the memories. I will amble upstream until I feel those ancient waters swirling between my toes. There, I will look for the girl." Pure poetry, I say again, and of the best kind that helps someone find themselves while alone in a cabin reading by firelight.
The more I do it, the more I do, indeed, think that walking barefoot is a spiritual experience. There is something about it that has started to become alive for me.
Thank you, Antonia.
I hadn't thought about this part of my life in forever, but reading your essay brought it all to mind. It felt good to step outside this suffocating matrix for a few minutes.
We lose so much as we transition out of childhood. We individuate and disconnect from our Mother, from Earth, from the Whole. Then, after our souls have been realigned by absorbing the values and perspectives of the world we find ourselves thrown into (after all, we are memetic creatures), we spend our lives attempting to find connection in any number of counterfeits—culture, consumerism, possession, ideologies, cults, religions, romantic obsessions, etc. We forget the value of simply being. We forget the value of taking only what we need and being grateful for it. We forget the inestimable joys and connections that are everywhere to be found if only we might see through the eyes of the child we once were.
We forget to walk barefoot.
As with so much of your writing and thoughts, I am taken by what pure poetry is here. We forget to walk barefoot, and that means so much beyond its first implication. Perhaps one of our biggest gifts is if we're able to relearn.
“That’s where I’ve been hiding.” I needed this tonight:). Thank you again for the gift of your words, and for passing along the gift of those poems! I feel like I’ve been to church, nourished by the spiritual abundance you find when many voices come together in prayer. On my nightly walk my feet will be joining in.
I thought of you while I was writing this. You wrote before about not wanting a new faith or church, but the return of the commons. I felt that strongly while walking the trail barefoot. It feels like a birthright of being alive, to be able to walk wherever the land calls us.
Oh I love that! I think I felt the welcome directed toward me in this piece, at a time when i needed a welcome. My feelings about church are, of course, complicated. But lately I’ve really missed the sensation of my body being received weekly into a community. You know how in life (especially in motherhood, especially in the past month of motherhood for me) we encounter ourselves in so many forms—some so dark and shadowy we feel ourselves exiled from the human community. There’s something about the rhythm of being weekly received into a community that is restorative—that is necessary for holding all the parts of ourselves. My body misses that, and I’m holding this sensory longing as a sort of prayer. Because I do think it’s a desire that runs deeper than church—it doesn’t really belong to a capitalist community with a fantasy future. Holding it as prayer, our feet might lead us to hidden possibilities of belonging.
Online community provides only a meaningful fraction of the community my body needs (always vulnerable to capitalist exploitation), but somehow this piece provided a glimmer, a taste of the deep satisfaction I haven’t felt in a long time. Maybe I felt myself being thought in a moment I wasn’t making noise. Maybe I felt myself being received.
I'm so glad you felt the welcome! I certainly thought of you. And the sensation of your body being received weekly into a community (how beautifully put) is I think an ancient human desire. In fact, if I remember, I wrote something about that briefly in my book on walking, after walking around Norwich Cathedral in England. It's 900 years old and I thought about all the generations of people walking those floors in weekly services and the kind of community-building that answered. My answer is the potential of neighborhoods, but that has a long, long way to go, and I don't think at all replaces the need of shared ritual. I think you're absolutely right that it's a desire that runs deeper than church.
I love how you perceive things and then express them! It answers something in me, too.
Mmmm, yes, I do believe we pray through our feet, at least as one way of praying. This is beautifully written (as are all your posts). Just as birds sing with their whole bodies, I think we pray like that. Makes me think of that quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, “When we walk like (we are rushing), we print anxiety and sorrow on the earth. We have to walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the earth... Be aware of the contact between your feet and the earth. Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.”
Ooh, I've never read that quote. That's beautiful, thank you!
These are wonderful thoughts on reading, on being at home with yourself, and…wonderful bluebirds. As you say an impossible blue. But what a beautiful impossibility made possible.
In Scandinavia the right to roam is intrinsic because of the instinctive bond with nature and the clear acceptance that being in it, being part of it, is essential for the the human spirit. You bring this out so clearly and well.
Yes! It's so important to remind those of us in private property-worshipping societies that it is possible for all humans to be able to roam our world, and share it, as in Scandinavia and Scotland. Thank you for the reminder.
Your writing is (as always) so beautiful. Each paragraph feels like a step further into a wild woods, until I find myself in a place I didn't know existed before I entered it. Your words about flowing water particularly struck me. My feet in the Sandy River once told me, finally, with no more doubt or hesitation, that I needed to leave my marriage. And I never wavered after. It was the cold, flowing water. It shifted something in me. I felt so cared for by it.
Ooh, I think we talked about that briefly before, didn't we? Not long ago. This might sound odd, but there is a lot about your story that makes me wish we could take a riverside walk together.
Thank you, thank you 🧡
Oh, I might have already shared that! It was such a profound experience for me. And not odd at all--I would like that, too.
Oof. This one brought tears to my eyes multiple times.
❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹
What a beautiful way to start the day. Thank you for the reminder to get outside!
Listening on my tablet and hearing the birds in the background, I opened up the Merlin app on my phone. It took about 2 seconds for it to confirm for me a black capped chickadee, a bird I hear here at home.
I'll spend part of the day today working on plans to relocate our community wells - a commons, of a sort - away from a planned housing development. This mess is, of course, rooted in private ownership of land. I'll write about it one day, but for now I'm too close to it.
Without people like you doing the work, John, there wouldn't be much to write about. You're doing the true work.
And yes, the one you could hear best was a black-capped chickadee! We have a lot around. I adore them.