Where We Walk

Last updated on: March 24, 2017 at 6:30 am by Marilyn McEntyre

Where We Walk 2017-03-24T06:30:08-07:00 Marilyn McEntyre

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Where we walk

I just got back from a morning walk under skies, far from home, that are threatening a thunderstorm, in just enough wind to feel fully awakened (completing what coffee had failed quite to accomplish). Layers of birdsong—more than I’m used to hearing in our more urban habitat—surrounded us like a thicket of sound. The sun was rising “a ribbon at a time” through the clouds. The air seemed charged with energy, and walking through it for 20 minutes changed us, somehow.

I thought of the many references in Biblical texts to what we “walk in.” The Psalmist praises God for having preserved him from falling “that I may walk before God in the light of life.” He prays, “Teach me your way O Lord, that I may walk in your truth. People who have no knowledge or understanding “walk in darkness.” And they are blameless who “walk in the law of the Lord.” “What does the Lord require of you,” Micah asks, “but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” Jesus ate and drank with people, napped in the boat and sat down to teach, but a good bit of the time he spent among human folks he walked—long walks: 98 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem; 99 miles from Jerusalem to Cana; 14 miles from Jerusalem to Samaria. He walked through crowds preaching and into the wilderness to pray. He was on the move. His church was a movement. Where it is healthy, it still is.

I generally pay more attention in the course of a day to what I’m walking toward or from, even when I’m just “out for a walk,” than to what I’m walking through. I’m walking to the river, or along its edge to a particular cove. I’m walking to class or my parking place or past the theater and the bookstore to the little place where they sell organic lunch food. But all the time I’m walking through a flow of human traffic, through the scent of pines along campus paths, through patches of sunlight that feel like blessing on a cold day.

One of the first of Mary Oliver’s poems I ever read begins with this startling observation: “There is all around us,/this country/of original fire.” The simple statement with dramatic line breaks that startle us into looking around at the air we breathe rather than through it reminds us of what we walk in. The light that comes to us from distant stars, molecules that have moved through many living beings, into the soil, into the water, into the clouds that will let them loose and scatter them among the just and the unjust. We walk in a company of angels we can’t see (though now and then someone spots one). We walk in the thick of our thoughts or sometimes in prayer or in a deliberate “walking meditation.”

It is only a step from there to the more mysterious idea that we may “walk in truth” or “in the law” or “in God’s ways” or “in love.” We are always in the midst of the currents of thought and feeling that direct our attention and shape our intentions. The word “conversation” once meant “to walk with.” The ordinary conversations that occur in the course of a day are crosscurrents to the conversations with self and God we call consciousness and conscience. Small tensions and resolutions, questions and answers, noticings and releasings, set the rhythm. On those days when the currents converge and “all that is within us” gathers into awareness and gratitude, we are able, like the healed man, to take up the beds where we’ve been lying crippled by one paralysis or another, and walk—perhaps to nowhere in particular, but simply for the joy of walking, empowered and awakened and free.

[image courtesy of snappygoat.com]

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