Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world. – Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
I have my paths of walking (and cycling) – to library, and coffee shop, food stores and river curves. At some point I realised that I intuitively started shifting my paths to intersect more with ‘green beads’ of experiencing the natural world. This meant Stopping to lean against a huge Willow, sitting on a bench in a bit of park, pausing by a lovely ‘butterfly’garden, stopping by a line of trees where birds hung out, or to watch the tower where the red tailed hawk nested, or by that view of the river’s wildness in the play of the rapids. Green wild natural glimpses, and soundings, smells, encouraging pausing, listening, breathing, dropping into the senses. Open to the spaces of nature, within the human constructed flows in our hyperkeystone natures has led me to crafting this practice of ‘green bead walking’.
On your walks, familiar and new, consider intentionally looking for and then weaving in those small nature moments. Listen, or look, smell and perhaps even pause interrupting the typical flow to destination. Cultivate the pauses, maybe a sort of yin nature moment. Drop into your senses, creating a ‘strand of green beads’ walking.