My daily ramble
Each day, when I set out on my walk, I encounter a resistance.
The first stretch, up the street from my house, is the hardest. I feel the heaviness of daily life upon me: the “to-do list” swirls around my head, along with any house chores that need doing, and the strains of any online communications that are going on. Leaving behind my phone, therefore, is key.
The other significance of this walk is that it’s up-hill. As I walk, the busy A-road is left further and further behind me. Living in the lowest dip of the land, as I walk, the light becomes brighter, and the air genuinely clearer. It serves as a physical manifestation of what happens in my mind each time I do my daily walk.
When I get to the point where the land opens up, and you can see for miles, it correlates exactly with the fresh feeling of openness in my consciousness, a shift from the internal dialogue to the world around me, the external, and hence a joining with the present.
Wherever I walk, I attempt to follow wildness and avoid the artificial. These days, I feel the difference between those places managed by humans - tidy and kept - and those claimed by nature. I could swear that there is a shift in energy between these places, where the land feels “happy” or “good”, and where it feels off and bad.
In material, or scientific terms, it’s a difference in the elements of those places. You can sense the balance in a spot of land with your senses. The smell of damp, happy earth, rich in naturally occurring chemicals or ‘nutrients’ - those which give our food the nutrients we need to be healthy. Today, I could even smell the chemical nitrogen fixers on the mown lawns, what we know as the garden product “Miracle-Gro”, before seeing its unmistakeable white pellets. I could feel the prickle of a headache from breathing in the chemicals, an indication of their danger.
Contrastingly, in the wild areas, the buzz of insects and birds and the shuffle of tiny mammals is palpable, but also a curious sense of tranquility, ease and equilibrium. I notice the birds quieten and the animals scuttle when a car roars past, and the unbearable contrast between the increasingly advanced world of man and the innocent realm of nature.
Meeting with the environment in this way, each day, and drifting and meandering amongst nature, I absorb its happy indifference, its benevolent equilibrium and that peace. Carving out time for this practice enriches each day of my life and meets a need that’s second to eating and drinking. It encourages a move from survival to flourishing, and enables a sense of perspective that encourages flow and movement in my work and creativity, bringing home what is profoundly authentic in life.
These days, really living requires added effort, since each day the modern world tugs on the heart-strings of our basic fears and desires and our primal motives. The modern world has been engineered to by-pass authentic sources of satisfaction, and our basic emotions are constantly manipulated by notifications: of dramatic and terrible news updates, instant messages from our friends, quick and easy snacks… The list goes on.
At the back of my mind sits the nagging truth that these shallow sources of life’s goods are stripping us little by little of its truest nature. Nevertheless, I am reassured that what is lost can always be once again found if one has the courage to choose the alternative, often more difficult path. Just as I do each day as I skirt along the wildness on my daily ramble.
