Another day, the same old walk. Except of course it isn’t. You can walk the same route day in, day out for years and it will never be the same walk twice. The day is different, you are different, what you see is different. The world changes moment to moment and so do we.
It is hard for those who love to walk in the wilds to be restricted to walking so close to home. No jumping in the car, no rushing to get a train to take us to the hills or the coast. Just the same path, out the door and go. We envy those within minutes of the beach. We think about the luck of those whose doorstep is a hillside, and no-one around. But only for as long as we forget that actually, that isn’t the life we chose when we had the choice. We chose to be where we are. For better or for worse.
I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m missing the salt sea air – and the hard-won view from a height – but I’m lucky. I live near the outskirts of town. Within a few foot-minutes I am on the field that leads down to the river that winds through the woods to the lake and on past it. Within a few foot-minutes I am in a Victorian park, where there is space enough and few enough people, if we’re sensible about it, and fish in the ponds, and herons fishing. Within a few foot minutes I am under the sky, in sight of the water, greeted by trees and flowers and non-human animals. Within a few foot minutes I can breathe in that part of the world, for which it is just another Spring. I can touch base in the most literal of senses. I can touch the planet. I can re-set my spirit and my soul.
Walking is not just about physical fitness. Look at me & you’d know that it’s not even about physical fitness. My physical health would definitely suffer if I didn’t take my daily walk. My almost-daily walk. I can miss a day or two…but then I get scratchety. I need to be out, under the sky.
But it’s more than that. If it was just a matter of fresh air and blue sky: I have a garden. Like I said, I’m lucky. But it is more than that. I need to be in motion, I need to be walking, settling into a rhythm, exploring, discovering, finding my place on the planet by bearing witness to the planet, taking delight in what unfolds as I take a step and a step and a step. Walking to keep pace as the planet turns beneath my feet.
I need the newness that every walk is. It might be the same old route, but it’s never the same old walk.
The weather is fickle at this time of year. A few days of shorts-weather warm, and then back into fleece and gloves. There was a gloves day during the week. A finger-chill day. I wasn’t out particularly early, but the clouds were low and so was the temperature. Cold and damp and it felt like dawn. It seems I wasn’t the only one who thought so. It seems the rabbits were fooled as well.
I strode thoughtlessly down the hill among the trees. No doubt my thunderous foot thuds telegraphing my approach to the ground dwellers – who, with the synchronicity of a murmuration or a swimming school of small fry, leapt out of camouflage and bolted for the burrows. Later I look up the collective noun for rabbits and I find a whole list. There is a bury of rabbits, or a colony, a down, a drove, or a flick, a husk, a leash, or a nest, or a trace…but no, this was none of those. This was an explosion of rabbits. One second, I’m looking through the trees, over the molehills, grateful for the empty morning expanse, and the next, in a flash of white tails, they erupt from the slope and head for the long grass and low shrubs where I guess their warren entrances are hidden.
I stop. Watch. They’re gone. I move on…and whoosh, a second wave make a break for it.
I’ve walked this route more often in the last couple of weeks than I would ever have intended, but this is the first day that I’ve had what Joyce would always call runny barrits.
It’s not lions on the Serengeti, or even sea otters on the Shetlands, but it is wildlife and it is on my doorstep, and it is unexpected. Sometimes it is the surprise of the ordinary that delights us.
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