Critical Reflection 4

Connect to outside sources (article/book/podcast/ted talk/blog/website/etc)

• This is a Text investigation. Consider your essential question in the context of at least two outside sources you have identified that connect to your essential question. How do these ideas resonate with or challenge your own beliefs, experiences, or practices? Be sure to give concrete and specific examples. You may want to address: ways the sources answered parts of your Essential Question, what additional questions were raised, or how your essential understanding of your project was altered or confirmed by the readings you did. Make sure to cite your sources.

My biggest inspirations for this project have been

• Walking, Henry David Thoreau
• Sisters of the Earth, Lorraine Anderson
• Woman and Nature, Susan Griffin
• On Photography, Susan Sontag
• Be Here Now, Ram Dass

The main book, which my project is based on, has helped me answer my essential question by posing what the importance of walking can do to the mind. One quote I particularly resonated with was this one, and I found it almost comical the way he compares the modern sedentary lifestyle to our true human desire to move and be outside. “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. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.” Another quote that I really loved was this one because it pushes the idea that a walk must be a leaving of one’s identity, that we cannot walk with guilt and with debt to society, because walking requires a certain level of freedom that society cannot grant us. “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.”

Another book that has inspired me is a book I was recently given by a friend who thought it might serve me for this project. Sisters of the Earth, a book of compilations of writing on females and the earth, edited and prefaced by Lorraine Anderson, digs into some of the core concepts of my project. One quote I found particularly illumination was. “Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers- Plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun’s warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life’s stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature’s pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.” This quote has guided me towards presence and awareness, which is something I’ve found to really value on my walks.

This excerpt from the book also resonated with me deeply. This comes from an essay called “Walking” by Chickasaw novelist and poet Linda Hogan. She writes of the way in which walking is felt deep down in her soul. “Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.”