Eternity in Every Step

…if we stay sedentary, we get scales over our eyes, and we stop realizing the wonders of the everyday world around us because they become overfamiliar.
But walking peels those scales off and allows you to rediscover the extraordinariness of so-called ordinary things. And that includes a walk through your town, a stroll out into the fields, or a park near your house—indeed, your backyard, if you choose to go micro…
~ Paul Salopek

Eternal Time in Every Step

Dear Subscriber First Name,

On my website, one of the most frequently visited pages is the blog post titled The Nature Pyramid: Are you Getting Your Recommended Doses?.

In June 2019, I was writing: “From daily micro-doses that can range from exposure to daylight and plant life multiple times per day to annual multi-day excursions into wilderness areas where people can disconnect from technology, the Nature Pyramid offers recommendations for duration as well as location of nature contact”. I still stand by these recommendations and personally practice them as faithfully as I can, engaging daily, weekly, monthly and annually in walks, hikes, journeys, and pilgrimages.

Altogether on another scale and dimension, I recently heard of Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk, a multiyear, 21,000-mile storytelling journey, that as a journalist, writer and National Geographic Fellow, he is undertaking across the globe in the footsteps of our ancestors. His journey on foot is not on the pyramid, it is the entire pyramid!

Salonek started his walk in 2013. He has now reached the province of Liaoning in northeastern China, about 500 miles north of Beijing. His destination is the southern tip of Patagonia. Every 100 miles or so he stops and produces a multi-media a piece that is published in the National Geographic. (Check the National Geographic for getting access to the written materials. Or check out the videos).

It’s only recently that I heard of Salonek’s odyssey while listening to an episode of the Emergence Magazine podcast titled A Path Older Than Memory: An interview with Paul Salonek.

In this interview, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Emergence Magazine’s editor, and Paul Salonek discuss Salonek’s experience of living at the pace of three miles per hour, – which Paul calls “a distinctly human tempo”, traversing natural or human-shaped, deserted or densely populated landscapes. I hope you will take the time to listen to their exchange, but if you don’t, I quote below what most inspired me in their conversation:

“You walk until your feet disappear. Until all waypoints flatten. The sky becomes the seamless sky. The horizon is just a horizon. The ticking of your wristwatch slows. Plant ten million footsteps across this Earth, and your heart pendulums to rest even as your shadow keeps moving. Look around. This is sacramental time.”

“This sense of geologic time that comes with spending long periods out walking is wonderful. .. I’ve described .. how when I’m walking in this state of mind, this kind of trance state that’s deeply inward where you’re like in a waking dream. You might be having like a movie of imagery going through your mind, but also you’re hyper alert, right? Because when you’re out walking, you can’t sort of sleepwalk through the world. Your body has to be switched on, right? I don’t walk with ear pods. I don’t listen to music. … And these kind of sensations of being kind of hyper-alert—like a hunter, like our original ancestors who walked, who blazed these trails—but also being inward does seem to tap into this sense of ancient time, maybe sacramental time, where the world is revolving, as I mentioned, underfoot like a ball. And it comes and goes, right? It’s not something that I can summon consciously. It just comes and goes. I have very distinct memories of when it does appear… It comes with this kind of deep sense of equanimity, this sense that, you know, I’m a transient particle through time and space.”

“And on the one hand, I’m directing my direction with every footstep that I take, but on the other, it’s sort of inconsequential which footstep I put down next. And I hope that some of that timelessness is also infusing my writing.”

The experience of timelessness and of selflessness that Salonek is sharing, this paradoxical state of being alert and deeply inward at the same time, what Vaughan-Lee describes as a “sense of a blurring between the physical and the metaphysical”, is something I also magically experience when walking, especially when walking solo in the woods.

Quite similar experiences are also described by deep meditators as, for example, in a book by Thich Nhat Hanh that I am currently reading: Zen and The Art of Saving the Planet. For the world-renowned Buddhist Zen master and activist, and his disciples, this sense of timelessness and selflessness is most easily found during sitting or walking meditation. In his words:

Last year, I was studying the teachings of this book in a 7-week online course of the same name offered by Plum Village in France, where Thich Nhat Hanh founded his monastery. (Enrollment for the Spring 2024 course just opened).
In the book and in the course, Sister True Dedication, a monastic ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh asks:

It’s apparent that through his walking odyssey, Salonek is asking himself similar questions – and getting some answers.

The next time you go out into nature for a walk, or a hike, or a pilgrimage, I invite you to take these inquiries as companions.

For further explorations on how to find eternity in every step, I include additional invitations below.

As always, please be in touch for comments, feedback or questions.

Warmly,

Anne-Marie
February 2, 2024
(422 ppm of atmospheric CO2, last year 420, safe level 350)

UC Climate Resilience Course for Undergraduates

I am honored to have been selected to be part of the UC Santa Cruz team that will teaching the in-person portion of this new class on Climate Resilience. If you know of undergraduate students in the UC system (this class is offered to many of the UC campuses, not just Santa Cruz), please pass on the info: course information is available at www.climateresilience.online

I think that this sense of well-being that comes with timelessness, the sense of being at peace—it must be very, very old. And it must be like a stylus dropping into a groove on the surface of a planet and making this music. And we are, our bodies are, that stylus, and we’re meant to move at this RPM that comes with the movement of our body.
~ Paul Salonek

Poem: The Way It Is by William Stafford