Walking for exercise is one of the few permitted activities during lock down. These past months the constraints on freedom and movement are felt as an assault on life itself, and it hurts.
I have always enjoyed walking. More than that, I have always needed to walk, going back to a childhood in the country three miles from public transport, when we couldn't afford a car.
But as I grew up, walking as necessity became something enjoyable, to be looked forward to. A Saturday walking for miles was our way of seeing the world, and finding our place in it.
The Scottish word is stravaigin, its meaning a combination of walking about for the sake of it, and that inner impulse to change where we are for somewhere else.
Moorland knee deep in heather, across green fields, around a loch, along the beach, up a hill or more than one; landscape, and what was to be found there, provides an outer world that heals, sustains and stimulates the inner world.
It's when I'm walking that I become more self-aware by becoming more attentive to what is around me. Walking creates a rhythm in which the body slowly fits itself to the world around, while recovering a sense of who it is that inhabits our inner world.
From those early years endlessly and tirelessly walking the world from our door, to these later years of walking to stay healthy, the experience is the same; time to learn, to love, to pay attention and to make space for joy to barge in.
One of the lock down walks took us up a local hill ,towards an expanding horizon under a casually choreographed canopy of clouds, in a sky only the best artists would attempt. Walking opens up new horizons so that we can see further and more clearly, and sometimes it does the same with our inner horizons helping us interpret the landscape of emotion, imagination and longing.
On the way up the hill, we passed the local wood pigeon, balanced nonchalantly on a dried branch. How do birds know a branch will take their weight? That kilo class pigeon is perhaps more secure on its precarious perch than I am with both feet on the ground.
And amongst the grass, allowed to grow longer to be cut for winter feeding, the usual meadow flowers in a Scottish field. And this tiny beauty, only visible from close up, soaking up sunshine and probably rooted in the rich nourishment of last year's manure. The biblical reference is obvious; "look at the birds...consider the lilies."
These long weeks of lock down have been emotionally expensive, at times emotionally ruinous. Incessant updates and briefings about a global health crisis one everyone's doorstep; anxiety and fear at the shops, replacing what used to be called retail therapy; uncertainty and sadness at so much normality erased overnight; loneliness and frustration as our primary emotional supporters of family, friends and togetherness are made unavailable to us.
New horizons of hope, a more secure sense of place, encounters with unexpected beauty; these are ways of re-configuring our inner world by walking in the outer world. Life has changed for good - I know, the phrase is uncomfortably ambiguous. But for those of us later in life it's hard to see how we will ever get back to life as we have known it for so long. And yet. Hopefulness grows out of looking for goodness, beauty, and truth in a God-made and God-loved world. If life has changed for good, perhaps it is our calling now to realise good out of the way life has changed.
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