He looks down at the shadow of his aching feet in the dusk: battered with hard use, melancholy, resigned. But proud. Like an old collie they yet raise their head and wag their tail with the premonition of some new work to be done. Their cloudy mind filled with the shadows of former glory. He feels a surge of love for them, all they’ve given. Walking, the purest pleasure of his life, unmingled with any sin or sorrow or vice. As a human activity, he thinks, unsurpassed. Adventurous but humble. Curious but not acquisitive. Vigorous but not willful. Desirous but not possessive. Slow, but persistent. Gentle but unstoppable. Face to face, yet set apart. Requiring nothing, free, utterly utterly free. Requiring no stinking fuels, no contraptions, no delicate supply chains, no decaying empires of tar and pitch, no permits from overbearing bureaucrats. Requiring only a buoyancy of soul, a resource common to all the living, if often misplaced. Requiring only a direction to march in, a song, a hunk of bread, an illustrated book of birds, faith in the horizon. Equally wonderful alone or with company, of the right sort. The riches of the world unveiled drop by drop, bite by bite. Providentially dispensed in the perfect portions. Only what we can swallow—so unlike the egregious wastefulness of cars, which gulp greedily, which turn all creation into a blur, into a water torture, into a dumb and purposeless barrier, into an annoyance notable only for standing between us and an imagined destination which, once achieved, fails to satisfy, which merely seeds the next episode of ungrateful restlessness. Walking is restless too, is movement, too, but so different. It is the grand and endless feast, the languidness of a body to be known, slowly, deliberately, inch by inch. What there is to see, smell, touch—like reality itself it can never be exhausted. Only enjoyed and, at times, endured. At times transmuted into painting or poetry for those burdened by those unquenchable compulsions. What his feet have lacked in power and speed they more than made up for in maneuverability, adaptability, prowess. With them he could climb, weave, jump, swing, sprint, burrow, clamber, wade. No fence or field could contain him. How many truly do not know, have never known, this sensation? Of the entire world for the having, from the grass under his toes out across continents and oceans, to its utter limit in some duskless infinity, a lover splayed open in total surrender? Some know it, and they do not keep it to themselves, and yet others show no interest. So there is a separateness and solidity of a brotherhood about it, though many come to it precisely as solitaries. A secret society of spies in the ancient cause of exploration. As a pedestrian on the street he may be cloaked as a commoner, perhaps he is only running an errand to the corner store. Yet he does not stop at the corner. He does not stop at the cross street, he does not stop at the park, dim with the arrival of evening, he does not stop at the raised bridge, he does not stop at the river, he does not stop as the river rises from the plains to the highlands, he does not stop even at the welcoming forest, which has known him from before all time and still faithfully keeps his name in its book of leaves... He keeps going, he reveals himself as something stranger, more removed, more curious, more aware. Separate, but involved. The most separate and the most involved, the most involved because his movement rebels against his separateness, and the most separate because his longing to be involved is born of the distance of the alienated observer, who loves from afar and longs to possess, longs to stop and stay and belong, but cannot, who can only belong by leaving, who can only be present in absence. Who must come to embrace without shame a hermaphroditic nature, bridging active and passive poles, equally at home penetrating into the world and opening to receive the world according to its delirious whim. These feet be blessed, he prays. He has been afraid to lose their gifts, the passage they buy him in the holy fellowship of wanderers, afraid to lose the streets and valleys and the long nights in motion, the pain and confusion and fear soothed by motion, motion his only spouse on earth. He has been afraid to lose the world, the one thing all will have to lose. Afraid of becoming a caged animal. Forgive me Lord Jesus, he begs. Merciful King of all that is good, for You know how my heart abhors a cell. Rest, some voice answers. Rest. So, he thinks. So. He will resume his long journey in the shelter of the books that found him in childhood and the pungent pigments that he turns to now. And what then? For the first time that which waits over the next ridge fills him with dread. He has never known stillness, the stillness is not in him. But he waits, he waits for the voice in the dark. Rest, walker, the darkness answers him after a millennium of silence. Regather your strength for the paths ahead.
Image: Isaac Levitan, Vladimirka (1892)