The Walkabout: Finding the Holy Land Underfoot
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.
Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.
-Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”
Thoreau was one of walking’s most passionate advocates. He was also an addict. The man needed at least three or four hours a day of the stuff to quench his spirit, to feel the wilderness that he so longed for within himself, to pull off the veil of creation and see God naked and shining in every frond and lark. Without it, dullness overcame him, and life bled from his spirit. He became a vagrant and an exile.
Walking was not merely a form of exercise. It was meditation and adventure. It was freedom. It was the worship of the untamed world, a baptism in the springs of eternity, initiation into the truths that lie beyond poems, sermons, and temples. Here, Thoreau found God atop a pine tree overlooking a valley, in its little red cones springing from the branches, in the fox slinking amidst the rushes.
His walks weren’t merely that of a slack-jawed devotee in awe of nature’s splendor. They were also of the scientist studying its shapes and patterns. He meticulously recorded his observations of the land throughout the year. He marked down the arrival of ducks, when the first frosts of winter, the ebb and flow of a river in spring. More than simply wandering in the precincts of the Holy Land, Thoreau mapped it out and measured its wonders.
These observations complimented his other ends. His knowledge of nature was a well-spring for his philosophical and political views, attested to in the cinematic quality of his work and how the woods of his backyard figured as large as any concept. Freedom was not reduced to a syllogism but uplifted by visions of the frontiersman pushing through the bush and a vulture gliding through the skies. Love was the dusty pinks of sunset and a pair of eagles roosting on a cliff. He rightly saw how much of what Americans had taken as truth was fabrication. National boundaries were made up. So too were laws. The ends which much the masses preoccupied themselves with dulled the spirit enough to make their wretched lives bearable.
Thoreau’s understanding was also revelation. In the vast tracts of wilderness around his cabin in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau drank deep from the wild. He knew that scriptures, traditions, and the arguments of logicians were but shadows of nature’s designs. Nature is truth, and truth must be met directly rather than through the reports of others. Ten thousand pages of books can never capture the sweetness of a rose, the texture of its petals, the vividness of its red. Only seeing a rose will do. Everything else is footnotes or propaganda. Walking was his pathway to that truth, his route to the Holy Land of the here and now.
Thoreau was not the first to use walking as meditation and revelation. He is but one in a long line of walkers going back thousands of years. The Native Americans were one of his inspirations for this practice. For the old tribes, walking was not simply a means of getting around; it was a spiritual journey and a meditation on the land. On the other side of the pond, Wordsworth shared a similar dedication to walking and was another of Thoreau’s inspirations in both his philosophy and his love of the trail. Wordsworth composed poetry as he wandered through the landscape, setting verse to the rhythm of his step. And like Thoreau, he elevated the walk to worship, combining exercise, contemplation, art, nature, and mysticism into one.
Looking further afield, the Far East has had a tradition of walking contemplation that is several thousands of years old. Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433 AD) began the mountains-and-rivers poetic tradition, and he popularized wandering the wilds as a spiritual and artistic exercise. His poem “Climbing Green-Cliff Mountain in Yung-chia” records one such mountain trek:
Taking a little food, a light walking-stick,
I wander up to my home in quiet mystery,
the path along streams winding far away
onto ridgetops, no end to this wonder at
slow waters silent in their frozen beauty
and bamboo glistening at heart with frost,
cascades scattering a confusion of spray
and broad forests crowding distant cliffs.
Thinking it’s moonrise I see in the west
and sunset I’m watching blaze in the east,
I hike on until dark, then linger out night
sheltered away in deep expanses of shadow.¹
The practice of wandering the hillsides as a form of spiritual practice likely predated him and could reach even as far back as Lao Tzu’s mythical life during the Warring States period (475-221 BC), but Hsieh Ling-yün puts the practice center stage. From then on, walking permeates the arts, producing ghostly landscape paintings and songs of steep gorges and wailing gibbons. The tradition would continue for another thousand years and make its way to Japan, where other famed artists took up the practice and made it their own. Saigyō (1118-1190) and Bashō (1644-1694) mastered the genre of poetic travelogue, each using walking as a source of artistic vision, vigor, and freedom.
A poem from Saigyō:
ALONG the trail’s edge
beside a sparkling river
in the willow shade,
I lingered to take a nap—
lingered, and I’m still here.²
From Bashō:
whiter than stones
of Stone Mountain-
autumn wind ³
These poems, like the essays of Thoreau and the verses of Wordsworth, are the relics they brought back from their journey. Their pilgrimage was the earth beneath their feet, the weariness and ecstasy of trekking through wind and snow. The Holy Land was their eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind absorbed in the seeds drifting through the air and the songs of thrushes in a ruined temple.
Walking is an ancient and perennial spiritual practice. I suspect that Thoreau’s initial hunch about the origins of his walking practice is correct (never mind that his etymology was wrong). Pilgrimage goes back far further than French peasants sojourning in search of relics and blessings. Pilgrimage has been a staple of European - and Asian - spirituality for thousands of years and remains so today. Even as Europe secularizes, one of its oldest pilgrimage routes, the Camino de Santiago, booms. Muslims, Hindus, pagans, and atheists have all traversed its ancient paths in search of meaning, camaraderie, healing, revelation, purification, rejuvenation. These pilgrims might differ in their professed beliefs and dress, but their longings and anxieties would be understood by their Bronze Age ancestors.
One of the oldest recorded pagan pilgrimages is the journey to the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. Here, Greeks from all over the Mediterranean traveled to consult the Oracle. When Xenophon was weighing whether to join Cyrus the Young’s mercenary force to overthrow Artaxerxes II, Socrates advised his young pupil to take a pilgrimage to Delphi and put his question to the seer. Xenophoon did as told, making the 300km journey likely on foot in search of wisdom. He would be but one of thousands that traveled there each year in search of wisdom and blessings. Like him, most would be on foot.
There’s also abundant archaeological evidence that pilgrimage was practiced by the Celts. In Gloucestershire, researchers have uncovered a large cult establishment dedicated to the British god Nodens, related to the Irish god Nuada. Miranda Green, an Iron Age Celt historian and archaeologist, describes the center:
The sanctuary at Lydney, built in the third century AD, was clearly supported by a wealthy and enthusiastic clientele: there were impressive buildings here, embellished with mosaics. They included a guest-house or hostel for pilgrims, a set of baths and a long structure which has been interpreted as a dormitory where visitors slept and encountered the healing-god in a vision.⁴
In hope of healing, pilgrims would offer models of their afflicted body parts or votive statues of dogs (symbols of healing and rejuvenation among the Celts), many of which have survived.
At another famous cultic site from the Celtic world, located along the North Sea coast of the Netherlands, devotees traveled upwards of 700km to seek the blessings of Nehalennia, goddess of seafarers, merchants, and travelers. This cult was so successful that it grew into a massive complex, supporting two temples, many altars, and lavishly decorated shrines.⁴
The historical record of these Celtic pilgrims is silent on how they viewed the practice, what they felt while marching through muddy roads, and what moved them to endure it all, but it’s no stretch to imagine they felt similar to how modern pilgrims feel today, from Buddhagaya to Shikoku to Camino de Santiago. Pilgrimage has a clear end-point: a healing shrine to Nehalennia, the opportunity to pay respect to the Buddha at his place of enlightenment, or the chance to secure merit and blessings by retracing the steps of Kukai, but as most pilgrims will tell you, the end-point is just a part of it; the other is the journey itself.
The journey is an initiation, readying pilgrims for their encounter with the divine. And without initiation, no encounter can take place. The initiation has many aspects. Socially, pilgrims joined in with like-minded fellows (see Canterbury Tales or The Laws) and chatted along the way, sharing stories, bickering, or, as in Plato’s The Laws, discussing philosophy. Physically, pilgrims must pay up to make the journey. A trip to the Camino de Santiago is expensive today, but it was especially taxing in pre-industrial times when excess wealth was a privilege of the aristocracy. Those seekers also must endure pain: lashing rains, tossing and turning in their sleep as wolves howl in the hills, pushing through the pain of blistered feet, the threat of highway robbers, missing home and fresh, delicious food. But they were also rewarded with the beauty of their surroundings. Bashō, Thoreau, and Wordsworth agree that beauty is itself the doorway to the divine. Immersed in cliffs washed in the orange of dusk, the songs of strange birds, sleeping with the stars as their roof, they are transformed. By the time they arrive, they have been made ready for darshan, the vision of the divine. Many pilgrims will have already met the gods long before even reaching their destination.
Wordsworth, Thoreau, Bashō, and others each offered their own twists on this perennial religious impulse, but they shared much with pilgrims, modern and old, namely, that diving into the wild, into the terror of the unknown, into the brutality of the elements, into the strain of the walk was their pathway to the divine. It can be ours too.
The walkabout practice is a derivative of the pilgrims of Nehalennia and the sauntering of Thoreau. There are many elements to the long pilgrimages of the Celts or the sprawling journeys of Bashō. If a Celtic pagan has the time, money, and will to follow in their footsteps, I heartily recommend it, but the walkabout is more modest. It’s a wander through the backwoods for an afternoon. It’s a long stroll through the neighborhood as dusk settles into night. It’s a practice that can be done in a half hour or over an entire day without the need to traverse 150km and sleep under the stars. It’s a pilgrimage into the land, a journey to the divine writ small.
Unlike the Camino de Santiago, Lydney, or even Thoreau’s epic wanderings through Concord, this isn’t a pilgrimage into the rarefied world of Christian saints or unspoiled woodlands - although it can be. At its heart, the walkabout is about stretching our legs and bronzing our skin while we immerse our senses in the surroundings, becoming intimate with the roads and trees, the birds and clouds racing across the sky. The walkabout is a pilgrimage into our homes, to the pot-marked streets and muddy roads, to the unknown caves in the hills and the copse of rowans growing on the hillside, to the fox den by the bridge and the hawk’s nest beside the overpass, to the Spanish style villa and the blue-tarped shanties underneath the overpass. The walkabout is a return home.
How To
There are two types of walkabouts⁵: simple and focused.
Simple Walkabout
A simple walkabout entails you stepping outside your house and letting your feet and senses take you where they may. Keep your eyes, ears, and nose peeled. Bask in the sensuous beauty of your land. Pause and admire the rusty barbed wire running atop a wall. Stop and listen to the cuckoos crying from the hills. When it feels right, move on. Alternatively, walk without pausing, allowing the sights, scents, and sounds to come and go as they please. Finally, return home when it feels right.
That’s it.
The simple walkabout is natural, relaxed, spontaneous, free. Despite its simplicity, don’t count it out. It’s a doorway to the heart of your land, a means to turn the background noise that passes you by on your way to work into a sprawling temple to the gods. Through the magic of attention, the walkabout turns every alley into a pilgrim’s path and every object into an idol for worship, every sound a hymn, every scent the sweetness of incense, and every touch the presence of the gods.
Focused Walkabout
The focused walkabout method is more complex but ensures a more comprehensive, purposeful survey of your home. The basic steps are as follows (although feel free to modify and experiment as you see fit):
1. Determine what you want to observe. Select one of the three categories to focus your observations on:
- Geography, Geology, and Climate
- Plants and Creatures
- Buildings and Infrastructure
Alternatively, you can divide these categories further to narrow in on a particular aspect of your land. For example, you could focus exclusively on birds, the sky, or houses.
2. Determine your route and departure time.
3. Walk. I suggest walking and stopping at fixed intervals, such as 10 minutes of walking and 3 minutes of resting. Walking covers distance, but stopping captures detail. You can also walk and pause as you feel fit, but I find (along with the Green Berets, who adopted this method for reconnaissance missions) that regular pauses sharpen the senses and vivify my surroundings.
4. Keep your intention in mind. It’s not a capital offense to focus on objects outside of your determined area of focus, but such diversions will diffuse your focus. To prevent straying, you can occasionally ask yourself questions during the walk related to the subject you’re focusing on. Some questions you might ask include:
- What is the weather like? Is the air humid or dry? What direction is the wind coming from?
- What do the plants look like? Smell like? Feel like? How healthy do they appear?
- What insects can I hear or see? How far away are they? Where are they? How many are there?
- What infrastructure can I see? What color is it? What does it feel like? Where is it located in relation to other buildings?
These questions direct your attention back to sensing and away from wondering what’s for dinner. Thinking about the names of objects is fine, but don’t go into city planner mode or start mapping an evolutionary tree of the beetle on the roadside. Experience directly.
5. Return home.
In addition to these steps, there are few tips worth bearing in mind:
1. This practice is a meditation, not a philosophical inquiry.
Reflection is fine - and even finer to do under the open sky or a cathedral of oaks, but that’s not what this is. While doing a walkabout, stick to your senses and put aside all other thoughts and concerns. Don’t analyze. Don’t try to figure things out. Experience creation with the vividness that it deserves. Once you finish the practice, then you can reflect on what you saw. This hard division between thought and observation prevents you from drifting off into former.
Previously, I pointed out how pilgrimage engaged multiple dimensions of its participants. They shared stories, discussed ideas, and drank together. Some, like Bashō, composed poetry or ruminated over the proper artistic flavors for their work. Wordsworth and Thoreau contemplated during their treks. But there are a few points to consider. First, they spent hours upon hours outside in a day, not just 20 or 45 minutes. On longer treks, alternating observation and contemplation is fine, but most modern pagans spend far too much time in their heads. They definitely don’t live in a cabin in 19th century America, and few have hours to immerse themselves in wilderness. Setting aside a solid chunk of time to just be with the lilies and cumulus clouds seems a more sensible correction. If a pagan is willing to go the Thoreau route and dedicate significant periods of time to being outdoors, then I think blending practices is more worthwhile.
2. Get out there at different hours of the day.
Each period has its own character and characters. Where I am, noon is scorching, sticky, and still; most birds and bugs are taking their siesta. The evening is magic. The winds are at a still; the birds are returning to their nests, and the sky is painted in the pastels of dusk. It’s also prime snake-spotting time. Midnight is balmy, crisp, and invigorating; frogs come to life, and a whole new set of insects dominate. For practical reasons, most pagans choose morning and evening for their adventures outdoors, save for when on long treks. Consider finding other times throughout the day to be outdoors and take in your land. You will be rewarded by encounters with new characters and atmospheres.
3. Be creative.
One of my favorite practices is to select a color when I go out on my walk and then zero in on it as I wander about. You never really know how much red is out there until you spend 40 minutes honed in on it. It’s a fun practice that also teaches that our world reflects what we attend to. You can think of other unusual qualities or angles to focus on during your walk. For example, limit your observations to one scent, like hearing, scent, or touch. Or you can notice only the creatures in trees. New angles open new worlds to you. It also brings a lightness and freshness to what can devolve into a chore.
4. Record your observations.
As Thoreau did, you can journal any noteworthy events after you finish your walk or at the end of every week. Time spent in silence recording the details of your home can, as it did for the Transcendentalists, become fodder for inquiry, sharpen your observations in the field, and draw the land in so close that you can hear her breathe. Thoreau followed a scientific approach, recording precise dates and taking measurements, but it needn’t be so precise. A whimsical and poetic journaling through the landscape can be equally illuminating.
5. Be careful when venturing out.
Wild, rural, and urban environments are fraught with danger. It's on you to learn what those risks are and the strategies to minimize them. If you live in bear country, bring bear spray. If it's wildfire season, check whether any are blazing up before you leave. If you're in the city, learn self-defense tactics and keep your eyes peeled for anything suspicious. Preparation and caution while about acknowledges the power of these places and your own fragility within them. Be respectful lest you incur their wrath.
6. Embrace the pain.
Pain is essential to pilgrimage, and one story from my time in Thailand brings this point home. Ajahn Fuang, a revered forest monk, once invited his students to join him on a pilgrimage. They were going to travel to different monasteries to meet the living masters of the Northeast and visit their places of practice. Excitement swept through his community, as this was unusual for the sedentary master.
When departure day finally arrived, Ajahn was furious. Most pilgrims came with two or three suitcases a piece, ready for a comfortable, luxurious journey to enlightenment. That’s not how this worked. Ajahn didn’t go out and chastise them for their foolishness. Instead, he shut-up and led his group onto a train headed to their first destination. But there was one thing he didn’t tell them: he was getting off twenty kilometers before their intended destination.
When Ajahn disembarked early, everyone followed suit in a mixture of confusion and anticipation. Once they had gathered, Ajahn walked off into the scorching heat. Some of his students protested, but he told them that they could either walk with him or go home. This was no spa retreat.
A few of them returned home bitter, but most followed after him. At first, they refused to leave their bags behind. A kilometer of dragging their suitcases along dirt roads removed any fantasy of that working. They gave their bags to poor locals in the villages they passed through, then soldiered on with only the bare necessities.
Ajahn Fuang demonstrated the proper attitude for pilgrimage. Cut out all excess, remove all burdens, and meet the world directly.
When walking about, follow the example that Ajahn Fuang and Thoreau set. Don’t shy away from suffering. Pain is the purification and initiation before meeting the divine face-to-face. Pain tempers the spirit, severs attachments, and proves to ourselves and nature that we are not here as tourists, grasping for some easy fix or amusement, but as seekers of truth. Then, we shall discover the Holy Land beneath our feet.
Notes
- David Hinton. Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (Kindle Edition: New Directions, 2005), 23.
- Sam Hamill and J. P. Seaton, ed. and trans., The Poetry of Zen (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), 86.
- Matsuo Basho. On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, trans. Lucien Stryk (Kindle Edition: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985), 294.
- Miranda Green, Animals in Celtic Life and Myth (London: Routledge, 1992), 199.
- Although I reference walking throughout the rest of this section, it’s possible to do this practice while running, bicycling, or driving. Walking is generally superior due to its slow pace, ability to capture detail, and exposure to the elements, but other forms of surveying have their uses.