W is for Wanderlust

Misha_gordin“An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape, the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.” – Lucy Lippard, Overlay

I really love that idea. Walking in a straight line to measure our rage. How far would yours get you? St. Louis? Cheyenne? Taipei?

And if you walked in a straight line to measure your love?

Your willingness to not know? How far would that get you?

Sure beats mapping my progress across the continental U.S. on a treadmill at 3.7 miles per hour–let me walk in representation, instead.

It’s always desperately irritating to me—in that “eat a Rice Krispie Treat in sheer frustration kind of way”—when someone writes a book I should have written. That’s how I felt several years ago when I saw Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. When I realized she had also written something beautifully entitled A Field Guide to Getting Lost, I upped the ante to Junior Mints, Skittles, and Blenheim’s Ginger Ale Red Label (the hottest).

Just as I am enamored of the idea of desire lines, I am buoyed by chapter titles like “The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.” Perambulating through space—how and when and for what—has long fascinated me. Sadly, we are even walking faster these days, at a time when slowing down might help. If a poem is a walk, we are woefully lacking in iambic pentameter, I’m thinking.

Wittgenstein was a pacer when he thought and wrote; I feel fairly certain that Malcolm Lowry must have been too, and certainly Virginia Woolf when she took Mrs Dalloway on that long walk through London.

Pilgrimages involve walking, creating straight lines toward faith, toward Adam’s Peak, or Mecca, looking for something larger than ourselves: it is a liminal state, a threshold between one’s past and future identities. Solnit reminds us: “When pilgrims begin to walk several things usually begin to happen to their perceptions of the world which continue over the course of the journey: they develop a changing sense of a time, a heightening of the senses, and a new awareness of their bodies and the landscape.”

Is there a personal geography? What is my pilgrimage in service to? I must walk more. I will mark my progress with a stick, to bear witness to the strength and length of my rage, or my love. “In the experience of walking,” as Solnit reports, “each step is a thought. You can’t escape yourself.” No matter how far you walk, no matter what you are carrying with you—or pushing in front of you.

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.

11 comments to " W is for Wanderlust "
  • Walking is on my wish list of things I want to do more of. Thanks for the reminder. But, eek, even when I’m walking I DO feel I should do it briskly so that I’ll be productive – not wasting time. A girl needs her exercise after all. But what I really want to do is amble around. Too many paths, too little time. That’s life for ya.

  • I don’t know how you do it–how you continually come up with these gems. You know that “desire lines” is one of my all-time favorite posts…and the idea of walking in a line to measure one’s feelings? WOW. I can think of a few instances where if I were to walk off resentment, I might be able to circle the globe…twice. (See “R Is for Rightness.”) ;) I haven’t been walking much (for me) lately. But I walked a lot during my S.F. and PDX lives. A LOT. People thought I was nutty to not have a car in those cities…what they didn’t understand is that I was walking toward sanity.

  • My 14 year old has issues with expressing anger. I’m going to have him read this.

  • howard h

    whaduhbout me? and Mrs. Dalloway? well lemme tell you what i think . . .

  • Blog synchronicity! Radiant Woman is talking on her blog today about plans to do the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage.

  • I don’t walk enough, but I used to. All over the city of Providence, RI in my twenties. I didn’t have to diet. I didn’t have to worry about my health. Now I’m in my fifties and living in rural Maine and I have to push myself to walk to the end of the driveway. Weird that walking was easy in the city and is hard in the country. Why is that?

    Shine On,
    Lill

  • “In the experience of walking, each step is a thought. You can’t escape yourself.”

    This is so true for me. When I walk the thoughts are overflowing the first couple of days. Then later I can be more still when all thoughts for the day have been thought.

    I will leave in 7 days, and the trip will be about 37 days! Nice to have visited 37 days. Miriam

  • Friday Fun

    Liz has done it again!  How that brain of hers comes up with these things is beyond me.  But I am so glad it does and I am especially glad I get to play.
    Ok, so the game is simple. 

    Liz wrote a story with bunches of blanks.
    Fill in the blank…

  • walking is a muse for me. i try to do it as often and in as many ways as possible. very slowly, drawing my view as i walk. swift as ever until exhausted and then lie flat on the grass. slowly, holding hands..
    it feeds my in some way.
    but for me this post wasn’t about walking. it was about anger and cultures that found beautiful, meaningful ways to deal with it without locking it up in a pill box. it was about what else i could honour and heal in this way.

  • Human beings journey in its midst, setting down and embarking in Hatton town but they never see the Peak. Sometimes the mist is so thick and the rains so wet that one must rely on the testimony of others to know that there is a mountain there.

    This past week I hiked the Alaka’i Swamp Trail. I was expecting the Big Payoff at the end of the trail. I was expecting the majestic view of Ha’aena on the north shore…but like the view from Hatton 30 years ago, the vision was clouded by fog.

    Unlike the relentless monsoons of Sri Lanka, the rains and clouds of Kauai leave plenty of time and space for enjoying the view even if one only has a few days or a few hours.

    Walk On!

  • Raquel Xamani Icart

    As an artist, I like to think that our “pilgrimage” is discovering a sense of origin. Each one of us are the point of origin. The starting point is where we are, with who we are, at this moment, at this time and place.
    When we start walking we might find ourselves hopeful or perhaps resistant to what our journey might bring to us but the WILLINGNESS to be ourselves gives us “the origin in originality.”

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