Aspects of Walking

The previous course used Walking as a method through which to explain these three concepts:

It also had the goal of teaching practical Walk-planning, and setting a period of time where your only task was to Walk, as well as imparting the general principle that a nature-oriented religion ought to call you out-of-doors.

In this essay, we will describe what you do once you are on your Walk once the novelty of being outdoors so much wears off - new ways of Walking. What are you supposed to be doing out there with all that time? What are you learning, doing and seeking? What is the point?

Here are some ideas. When you take on this course, your task is to make one or several of these the object of study. Alternatively, if Walking is not your main focus, you can mix and match them or do what seems right on the day.

A Lovely Walk

☉

As already described, sometimes your walk can just be a walk. A walk for pleasure, celebrating that you exist and the world is fair - waving hello to people in the village, wandering about, hearing the birds and looking at maps. As a Solar practice, the Lovely Walk doesn't need anything added to it: it is ritual. For the Solar sees the magic in humble, everyday things.

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements - Thoreau
a pleasant painting of groups of people ambling by the cliffs and fields near a sunny sea
'Downland Rambles - Beachy Head to Eastbourne, Sussex', Adrian Allinson

Playtime

☉✺/☽

The ☉✺ has a subtheme - being as a child; the ☽ indicates encounters with fairyland. Playtime is to adjust your thinking and seeing to enter into an altered state, where you are both here-and-not-here. Celtic lore describes the otherworlds as contiguous with our own - the kind of place one might stumble into - and this is no less possible in our own time. Playtime is entering into the kind of state where such things can occur - I call it the near-astral, deliberately imagining visions and encounters to take the first few steps towards the strange, so you are open to its approaching in turn, rather like thinking deliberately on the pillow until the dreamworld takes it over.

It's closely supported by your Reading, which suggests scenes and situations seeded in the landscape. I find the more Reading I do, the more I slip into playtime unawares - startled by a view that seems suddenly familiar, or a question and answer that follows the old pattern.

Playing will come back faster than you imagine, if you haven't done it in a while, and especially if you are off in the woods alone. Here are some ideas:

Let things be strange.

Reading Selections

a little girl with a sword looks up at a forest with a worried face
Elsa Beskow

Presence

☉✺

This path is the story of those consumed by the natural world, the meeting point of ☉ - being part of a system - and ✺ - the mighty wild. We consider those forests made up of a single tree that has sprouted many trees; the relationship between funghi and roots that lets the forest communicate across its span; the relationship between the responses of birds and the other creatures who hear birds; and so forth.

Mindfulness has become a bit of a dirty word, tarnished by its cynical co-option as a corporate wellbeing tool. Call it what you will. It is the skill of existing in your body, and connecting your body to other bodies, through moving your awareness. You can use basic mindfulness - identify 5 sounds you can hear; what does your skin feel like against the grass; stay in this present moment. But you can also extend into trippy intensity by focusing on things not-quiet-there: breathing in and out with a landscape; experiencing yourself within a stone; overloading your awareness of a rock-face until it seems on the brink of cracking open; and so forth.

The intention is to get as close as you can to being no longer your self, but experiencing yourself as small-yet-intertwined within nature; or perhaps to experience transformation into animal or plant.

Reading Selections

a cluttered, psychedelic image of the natural world
Ken Gun Min - Xochipillia, 2022

Knowledge

☽

Pagans often aspire to be the kind of person who has intimate familiarity with the land: woodsmen, hunters, farmers, herbalists. You can give simple structure to walks by picking things to learn: the names and properties of trees, the different calls of birds, where and how the mushrooms grow, what landscapes exist in your bioregion.

I like this one. It's straightforward, a good choice for tired days. The goal is not exactly to become an expert, but the way learning can give a bit of shape and structure by calling your focus to the world in different ways, and to exist in a natural space more interactively. I find when you know more, you notice more - no longer seeing 'grass' but a sequence of familiar faces and old friends.

Reading Selections

Survival

☽✺

When we contemplate the Stellar wild, we meditate on how mighty and terrifying nature is when beyond our control and the compensations of human living.

We consider our far-distant first ancestors, beyond the edge of oral memory. We learn to endure powerlessness as small creatures in an unfathomable existence. We experience the natural world in a new way, as giver of tools and harshest of masters. This part of the path tells the story of the one who walks somewhere terrifying - Frodo to Mordor, Orpheus to the Underworld, Odin to the Tree - the very limits of endurance, courage and confidence a mage must sometimes call on.

Playing survival builds fear (and not a little gratitude you will soon be going home). Where would I find water? Where here is good to camp? Do I know these trees and their properties? What wild greens and roots are fresh this month? Could I find firewood? Just asking the questions as I travel changes how I experience the land.

I keep notes on what I'm doing in this strand on the Wilderblog.

Things to Do

☉☽

Our lore describes a lot of walkers. There are two archetypes I think of most. Bilbo Baggins, off on a quest - many a post-Tolkien fantasy book has centered distances by foot and campfires in the woods as essential confetti to tales of the heroic and strange. I tend to think of The Hobbit more than Lord of the Rings because Bilbo gets caught up in an adventure, rather than making a serious committment to a cosmic goal. The second is the antiquarian busybody, going about the hedgerows by bicycle, unwary of danger buried in the soil. Sometimes I think of Percival and the Grail knights, looking for they know-not-where.

Common things to do:

The ☉☽ is outward-facing, active and purposeful. When you have tasks to complete, always ask if it is practicable for you to complete them on foot.

Hermitage

☽✺

Where the Wanderer is distance, the Hermit is time. The natural end-goal of some of our themes is to spend time alone in the wild, listening to only the spirits. One important task of Walking is to build your ability to do this - both practically and emotionally. One might start with the capacity for a 3 hour hike - it doesn't have to be strenuous walking or get you anyplace fardistant, it's really the time spent. A good early target to set is a 24-hour wilderness solo.

Long term, at least some people in our community should be asking whether they have a vocation for hermitage - as the furthest development of this kind of work - the way that others might choose deep deity devotion or advanced magic.

Reading Selections

an odd figure with big hair crouches in the grass, near a stone
Robert Ingpen

Resistance

☉☽/☉✺ (Fields)

Starwards of the Sun, the Solar contemplates freedom from care, peace, prosperity and rest - a feeling we find in the Fields. It occurs to me often as I walk that it is the one time nobody can expect me to be doing anything, and with the expansion of the internet it is a truly rare feeling (as Crary notes, there is now no place or time on earth one cannot potentially be shopping or at work).

To be off on a walk is a form of refusal - to be momentarily outside the world, and outside of time.

Re-enchantment

☉✺

As you walk, you re-enchant the land. You re-awaken the spirits by your seeing them. You mark the passing years into place with ritual done out-of-doors. You make maps with your passage. To have done it is enough.

Now, go out-of-doors

And see what adventures you can stumble into

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