Wanderland -October 2010

'Travellers,there is no path, paths are made by walking.' Antonio Machado

'If you just set people in motion, they'll heal themselves.' Gabrielle Roth

'Dancers need music, but walkers are their own music.' W.A. Mathieu

I love to walk the land. Walking is something I have always done and in many ways taken for granted that I can do easily. It is only when I had a foot injury that I realised just how important it was to me. In times of stress, I walk; when I am in need of inspiration, I walk; I walk when I need peace; I walk when I feel crazy; I walk as a pilgrim and a poet, a nature lover and an adventurer; I walk to heal, to create, to ground and to breathe again.

And yet it seems to me that in our hectic, work driven, media savvy age we limit our horizon to the office window or the computer screen. We haven't the time, we say, to go for a walk; even artists all too often shut themselves away from new experiences and therefore deny themselves both sight and insight.Walking is simple and commonplace; we take it for granted and yet it is one of the most, if not the most, potent creative tool I know. Walking offers spiritual renewal and is a gateway to the imagination. Walking allows our imagination a chance to wonder and to feed. Being in motion provides us an infinite world of in-sight and sensation. As I walk the land I find that I feel a new rhythm and gradually become in tune with the pulse of Mother Earth around me and beneath me.I hear bird's song, smell the scents of flowers, feel the breath of wind on my cheek,taste the juice of blackberries and literally and metaphorically, see the light. My heart starts to beat more steadily and my breath comes easily as I come into harmony with nature's music. My senses come alive and I walk into the ground of being, synonymous with being in spirit or goddess or whatever you choose that creative principle to be.This act of walking is a journey into soul through the soles of my feet.

Walking is an ancient form of meditation used by all cultures and creeds from the Aboriginal Walkabout, to the Native American Vision Quest and the Christian pilgrimage. For a long time I have journeyed to sacred sites in what I now realise was an act of pilgrimage and a source of spiritual renewel, whether it be the stones of Callenish or the temples of Malta, Glastonbury Tor or the Boyne Valley. I love to walk the local ancient sites and found this more interesting once I read more about Ley Lines and earth energies. The fact that these leys of energy converge at key nodal points and that our ancestors must have been following these lines too, to the point that they built sacred sites upon them, is testament to the power of Gaia's spell.As we walk the ancient leys, we are realligned in our own energy.

'People have travelled over this Earth with a heart of inquiry for millennia. They have sung the land as a living being, offered themselves, their steps, their voices and prayers as acts of purification that opened them to an experience of connectedness.' Joan Halifax, cultural ecologist.

Most interesting to me is the fact that so many poets I love are walkers and mystics:the Romantic poets, in particular Wordsworth and Coleridge who composed the Lyrical Ballads whilst walking in the Quantocks near Exmoor; Emily Bronte with her walks on the heaths and wuthering heights of the Pennine moors near Howarth Parsonage;Keats' pilgrimages to Staffa and the Isle of Wight; Thomas Hardy's Lyonesse and Wessex.The poet is a bard inspired by world soul. Walt Whitman sang 'the body electric' - the planetary song. Is it any wonder that poems are divided into metrical 'feet'? Shakespeare's actors remembered their lines through the soles of their feet as they 'walked through' them. How else would they have managed such a wide repertoir of plays. They were helped by iambic pentameter and the rhythm of the lines.Bruce Chatwin's book 'Songlines' really explores this notion of walking the land into being in the Aboriginal Dreamtime landscape:

'The Ancestors sang the world into existence....each totemic ancestor while travelling through the country was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the lines of his fotprints...' Bruce Chatwin 'Songlines'

Ancient people's sang the land and animated it. They knew their own piece of earth and honoured it. This was a fundemental oral tradition passed down to their children through song and story, music and dance, art and drama.I was recently reading 'Boudica' by Manda Scott. Although she insists that much of her world is imagined,she has researched widely from the available sources (mostly Roman) and ends with Boudica riding away from a final battle with theRomans under the cover of mist evoked by the bards or seers of the tribes 'The Dreamers'. It is more crucial that the children escape than to fight. This is not just so that they will be the warriors of the future as the vision of the Grandmother warns:

' That is not enough. There must be those old enough to carry their ways, their dreams and their tales. How else does a people know itself?' Manda Scott 'Boudica, Dreaming the Eagle'

This message has haunted me....walking is not just a form of exercise, not a pleasant past-time, not a cheap way of spending free time, not a chance for a chat with a friend...it is a way of ancient knowing; a way to keep the paths and the gateways to inspiration and insight open for the next generation and their children.It is a way of coming back into touch with Mother Earth and of finding our centre. It is a simple and powerful means of shaping and creating our dreams and being at one with the source of infinity.