“I think that this sense of well-being that comes with timelessness, the sense of being at peace – it must be very, very old. And it must be like a stylus dropping into a groove on the surface of the planet and making this music. And we are, our bodies are, that stylus, and we’re meant to move at this RPM that comes with the movement of our bodies.”
Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine
Last week, I took the time to open, click, listen, and read the conversation with Paul Salopek and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, founder of Emergence Magazine, an award-winning magazine and creative production studio that explores the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. An hour later, so intrigued with their conversation, I shared it on Facebook, logged onto their follow up ZOOM conversation live streamed from the UK this past weekend, and recommended it to my local Camino group at the start of our Saturday walk.
Salopek, an award-winning journalist, embarked ten years ago on a winding course retracing the migration pathway of early humans out of Africa, across Asia, eventually to cross the Bering Strait, down the Americas to Patagonia. Both in Emergence and more fully on the National Geographic page hosting this epic photo story, he describes how his personal relationship to time and the sharing of meaningful stories has deepened while moving through the world at three miles (5 km) per hour, or as my friend Christina Baldwin writes, “at the pace of guidance” and story.
“And I thought this would be an interesting experiment in slow storytelling or slow journalism, a way of slowing down my methodology and immersing myself in the lives of the people who inhabit the headlines of our day. So it’s been kind of a giant kind of a planet-sized studio to think about how stories are connected—not just kind of mega stories, say the climate crisis or human conflict, but our individual stories as well. And one way that I’ve found that does it really well is by slowing myself down and walking from person to person. That’s basically the premise of this. It’s a listening project where the destination almost always is another person.”
Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine
I love to walk. I have been walking more or less every Saturday morning in Edmonton’s famed river valley with my local chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims, a “yes” I’d said several years ago on a wintry morning in January, and easily the most significant “yes” I’d said that year. What initially started as one member’s quest to train for his first Camino de Santiago trek, where walking was the raison d’etre, has evolved into a time for us to walk, be in community, and enjoy coffee at local cafes. True to my style, some Saturdays find me more extraverted, engaged in a series of edifying conversations along the path, while others, like this past weekend, ask of me to surrender to the silent restorative of its sunny, almost balmy morning. Stopping for a moment near the trail end, I smelled and felt those faint stirrings of spring, in time with this week’s celebration of Imbolc, the first day of spring in Celtic tradition.
I didn’t grow up in a walking family. Though recently it registered that I may have “inherited” an affinity for trekking from my father, who as a young teen at the conclusion of WWII, found himself alone, displaced, and dodging prisoner of war camps in Germany, taking months to walk his way home to the Black Forest where his mother held her breath waiting for his safe return.
I used to regularly hike in the Rocky Mountains, though it’s been well over a decade, and I miss those outings with my women friends. Since Covid, I’ve made two long distance walks, the Portuguese Coastal Camino to Santiago de Compostela, Spain in May-June 2022, and most recently, the Via di Francesco, from Assisi to Rome in September-October 2023. I’ve discovered, like Paul, and many of us, my pace is about 3 miles (5 km) per hour…even when sauntering, my preferred way of moving (when I’m not kitchen dancing.)
“You do not have to, you know, make your way to the jungles of northeastern India to experience this thing. I think it’s there for you. And it might be a little tougher to see and experience if it’s part of your daily life, whether you’re living in a small town or a megalopolis or anything in between, because, as usual, if we stay sedentary, we get scales over our eyes, and we stop realizing the wonders of the everyday world around us because they become over familiar. But walking peels those scales off and allows you to rediscover the extraordinariness of so-called ordinary things. And that includes a walk through your town, a stroll out into the fields, or a park near your house—indeed, your backyard, if you choose to go micro, right?“
Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine
Walking with Annie was an invitation in peeling off the scales. As I wrote in a post during what would be her last days, “Walking Annie is no longer exercise. It’s fresh air, the gift of being outside noticing life around us.” Admittedly, still missing her, it takes a bit more presence and intention to notice life around me, scales off, without her. And yet, more often than not, I experience what Paul Salopek describes as an:
“astonishing internal metronome that’s built inside of us, inside of our body, that distinguishes us from almost every other animal…this goodness that’s kind of humming in our bones, waiting to be let out.”
Listening and reading and looking at Paul’s journey, I’m stoked to envision my next long, slow walk, wondering what memories will be evoked, people encountered, stories conjured, bones set to humming, all waiting to be let out?
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.