Walking has been a way for me to relax, exercise, and enjoy the outdoors for most of my life.
I have a clear memory of a summer when I was 8 or 9 years old. I set my alarm to wake up early so I could take our heavy-coated collie for a walk before it got too hot.
And then somewhere around age 11 or 12, my walks became a little less practical. They took on deeper significance. They became a source of spiritual connection and even transcendence.
After evening walks I started writing poems in a notebook. I was so full of a surge of spiritual wonderment that I just had to get it down! I had to express it somehow.
And I didn’t have enough words to describe what I was experiencing, so I learned the names of plants and trees. I studied star charts to know the names of the planets that appear in the evening on the horizon and the constellations that dot the sky in the different seasons and different times of night. I stayed up late in August to watch the annual Perseid meteor shower.
Even today when I see those same planets and constellations, I go back to being that girl who knew wonder, amazement, and enchantment in the great outdoors. I still am that young girl who inherently knew that touching the earth and reaching for the sky were pathways to the magic realm of creation.
And even before adolescent me began taking walks and spouting poetry, I was a little girl who roamed the yard at all times of the year, collecting berries, helicopters, seeds from dogwoods, sticker balls from the sugar gum trees, and of course, I made crowns and necklaces from clover blossoms and their long thin stems.
Many of these collections were made on Frisbees and in plastic buckets that I pretended were plates and cooking bowls. The bushes and the trees were my spice rack. I also sprinkled blue Magic Sand and held it all together with silly putty.
The pure joy for me of remembering this story—is the feeling. I got lost in the world right outside our front door. I existed out of time—only aware of all those berries and seeds.
It wasn’t playing with my Barbies or blocks or anything that had shown up under the Christmas tree that resulted in this sense of deep presence and satisfaction and contentment. It was always when I was outside playing that I felt that timelessness.
You might say that I was found. I found my true nature. In nature.
I’d say that’s what I find when I rest on the lounge chair on our patio among the palms and bougainvillea or sit on the driveway and watch the sunset. I find my true nature. In nature.
As adults, maybe we don’t get to lose ourselves in an afternoon playing outside. But maybe we can find a minute or two. A moment to touch the earth. To hear the rustle of the wind through the palms. The pounding of the distant surf.
What seems, and often is simple, can be insurmountably hard if we let it.
That’s why memories like the ones I have of my childhood and adolescence feel like forgiveness, or mercy, or compassion.
Memories like that can power transformation and transcendence.
French writer Marcel Proust in his novel Remembrance of Things Past has his character take a bite of a petit Madeleine, a seashell-shaped cookie, and is transported to his childhood with such completeness and immediacy that a seven volume novel issues from it. Much of his memories revolve around his childhood home in the French countryside where his family took long walks.
His potent memories of childhood play and touching the earth shaped him into one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
I know that I need to connect with my memories more. I know that I need to spend more time outside because I realize that I unconsciously touch the earth in thousands of ways every day. The plastic that comes in and out of my house daily. The exhaust from my car. The electricity that I use. All of it makes an impact.
I want to touch the earth with more intentionality. Like spending an hour watching the night sky, slowly tracking the movement of Earth by noting the apparent movement of the stars and moon.
I want to seek inspiration from ancient people, people who only knew that the stars moved, not the earth, and yet, they built structures aligned precisely to the position of the sun and stars.
One of my favorite of these structures is Newgrange in Ireland. Newgrange is a mound built by Stone Age farmers in 3,200 B.C.E. It contains a 60ft long passage that leads to an inner chamber. This chamber nestled within the earth is illuminated by the sun only on the days surrounding the winter solstice.
Only a people deeply connected to the cycles and seasons of the earth could build such a structure. These ancient people knew how to touch the earth; in fact, they could never escape their connection to it.
We can’t either. But we have the illusion of comfort and security about us that makes it feel like we can.
These days, the forces of nature are screaming at us. We have to witness the catastrophic and strange patterns of our changing climate. We have to see the particles of plastic washing up on our shores. We have to pay attention to the record breaking heat of our summers.
I think part of the solution, or at least what might inspire us to find one, could be to remember what it was like to play outside. We must allow ourselves to be enchanted. We must witness the return of the sunlight. Build inner chambers that can hold and honor it.
Our very existence depends upon a massive shift in our thinking and doing. Like what happened in the spring of 2020 when the world was in lockdown and dolphins swam in the canals of Venice.
Imagine what could happen if we chose this time
to slow down,
to go outside,
and let the magic of nature come to us.
-Photo by Fabian Kleiser on Unsplash
Radiance Within 