The Walk - Part One

For the record, I could have ended the last entry with "More soon."  This qualifies as soon.

So… The Walk.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate why walking has become so important to me.  Why has something so ordinary and mundane become the focal point of so many of my waking thoughts?  Why has it started to dominate my dreams?  What, if anything, does it have to do with unlocking my creative self?

As it turns out, the simplest answer is also the truest one.

Walking is how I pray.

????  Yeah, I know.  That’s just weird.  It’s just… walking.  Shuffling our feet to get from point A to point B.  How is it prayer?

For me, it’s the one thing that I have found that allows me to get my thoughts to shut up long enough that I can allow the voice of God to speak to me.  When I walk, when I lose myself in the rhythm of allowing my steps to carry me forward, my mind calms, my stress falls away.  I start to take in what is beautiful in my surroundings.  It’s meditative for me.  I’ve known this for years now, but it’s only recently that I have come to realize that this is how I pray.

When I was little, I had a very different view on what constituted prayer.  Until I was in sixth grade, I was raised in a very traditional Methodist Church.  It was the church my grandparents had attended since moving to Albuquerque in 1955, the church where my parents got married, and my aunt and uncle each were married there, as well. (It was even where Melanie and I were married, but that’s another story.)  Prayer had a very specific language and rhythm, sounding a lot like reading from a King James Bible.  Although I never could find where it was written, I was convinced that there was a minimum number of “Thee’s and Thy’s” required in even the simplest prayer, and you had to say “Holy” a lot.  When my Grandpa would pray over a Sunday dinner, it was always beautiful, and formal, and heartfelt, and yet somehow I always felt like I was listening to something in a foreign tongue..

I never could pray like that.  When I tried, my BS meter went off like the red alert claxon on the bridge of Captain Kirk’s USS Enterprise.  I knew it was real when my Grandpa prayed in that language, but for me…  my inner voice would scream “Fraud!” and throw rotten vegetables at the inside of my head.  Later, I learned to fake my way through a casual prayer in youth group, but I still knew the truth.  Despite the best efforts of my family, I was chronically prayer-deficient. 

To be honest, this sucked.  It fell in the same category as my sports-deficiency in school.  (Not only was I always the last one picked, but teams used to argue over who got stuck with me.)  To my young mind, it was just another example of how I was a freak.  I suspect it was a major contributor to my rejection of my faith as a young adult.  If I couldn’t talk to God, it meant there was no God, therefore there was nothing wrong with me being unable to pray.  In hindsight, the logic was rather flawed, but it seemed to serve me at the time.  Interestingly enough, this was also the same period where I quit writing, quit creating photographs, quit being creative in any way.  It’s almost as though my spiritual life and my creative life were connected somehow…

Duh.

In the end, this proved to be an unsustainable model for me.  Try as I might, I simply could not ignore the evidence that there was more to this life, and to me, than my “Godless” theories could account for.  Slowly, I started to believe again, despite the fact that I really didn’t want to.  In many ways, it was an unpleasant process, because I still couldn’t pray, although I got much better at acting as though I could.  I was an oddly-shaped peg, trying to convince everyone that I fit perfectly into a standard round hole.  I wanted desperately to be normal.

Thank God I got over that!  I’m weird.  I knew that then, but I’m comfortable with it now.  I’m actually audacious enough now to think that my weirdness is one of the coolest things about being me.

It was about this time that we moved from New Mexico to northeastern Oklahoma.  To say it was a tumultuous time for us would be a significant understatement.  I hadn’t realized how important my sense of place was to my perception of who I was.  I was angry, and frightened, and my self-esteem was non-existent.  Oh, and did I mention that we had NO money?  None.  It was not fun, not in the slightest.

I started taking walks.  At first, it was just a way to get out of the house, because it was like living in a pressure cooker.  Soon, though, it became something more.  I started to connect with the beauty of where we were.  We had moved to a pretty little town, and there was a wonderful trail that followed the winding course of the river through the center of town.  I’d see deer, and fireflies, and once a great horned owl flew inches above my head without making a sound.  I’d walk through the 80-year-old neighborhoods near our house, and I started to feel a connection to the history of the place, to the generations that had called this small city home before us.  My walks grew from blocks to miles.

In the fall, I walked south from our house, discovering that a mile south of us the city street crossed a railroad track and became a country lane.  A couple of miles beyond that, I discovered 200-year-old cemeteries, where the dates on the tombstones told tragic stories of an epidemic wiping out a generation of children.  A mile further, I stepped off the road and pushed through a narrow opening in tall grasses, only to discover a beaver pond hidden within 20 feet of the road.  It was… magical.

In those moments, as my feet and legs started to ache with the distances I was covering, I started to find peace.  I would leave my front door broken and hurting, and come back through it a few hours later with a sense that this difficult time was a temporary thing.  I didn’t understand why it worked.  I just knew that it did. 

Our neighbors thought I was a bit crazy, and I really don’t blame them.  Sane people don’t go for walks in Oklahoma when the thermometer is pushing past 100 degrees and the humidity is hovering around 80%.  I didn’t care.  The weather was miserable, but it was worth it to quiet my mind.

Fast-forward ten years.  I’m in Tahlequah, and Melanie and the kids have already returned to New Mexico.  I was alone, exhausted, working 12+ hour days trying to get our house ready to sell.  I’d walk the streets of the town we’d lived in for six years, I’d drive down and walk the banks of the Illinois river beneath fall foilage, I’d walk county roads just before sunset.  Anything to quiet the thoughts raging in my mind.

Another leap forward in time – just a few months.  We’re back in New Mexico, my beloved Sandia Mountains visible from my back porch, but it’s not the homecoming I'd expected.  The details don’t matter, but life was… unpleasant.  The thing was, I promised myself that if I ever returned to New Mexico, I’d savor it.  So… I walked.  I walked from our house to a funky overlook perched on a hilltop a few miles away, and from there I walked to the library.  I drove down to the river and walked through the bosque along the Rio Grande, and on Good Friday, I drove down south of Los Lunas and walked to the top of El Cerro Tome – my first pilgrimage.  I walked along Sandia Crest, and through the alien landscape of Tent Rocks.  I rode the RailRunner north, and walked the streets of Santa Fe.

One last leap forward in time, and we’re living in Santa Fe.  To my delight, I discovered an arroyo trail less than a quarter mile from our house, and I started exploring it in the evenings with my beagle.  Before long, I discovered that trail led to another road, and then another arroyo trail where artistic souls had stacked rocks in fantastical monuments to the simple fact that they had been there.  A few weeks later, I got a job in a gallery on Canyon Road, and I started walking to work every chance I got. 

I found myself walking along Old Santa Fe Trail, the same road I’d read about in history books in grade school.  I walked beside the waters running in Acequia Madre, the mother ditch, my feet following a road that was laid out over four hundred years in the past.  At the risk of sounding very “New Age,” I developed a profound connection with our new home through the soles of my feet.  I wore out a pair of hiking boots, replaced them, and then wore out the replacements.  According to the pedometer in my smart phone, (which I only use to document my “real” walks), I’ve logged over 750 miles since I started calling Santa Fe home.

And, when life got stressful, I walked to find peace.  It was on one of those walks when I heard a very quiet, calm voice say, “This is how you talk to me.”

I remember stopping mid-stride, not sure what I’d just heard.  I can still close my eyes and clearly recall where I was at that moment:  Off-trail in the Arroyo de los Piñones, just west of Museum Hill.  I remember looking down at the dry streambed beneath my feet, and seeing that there was rich black iron ore woven into the patterns in the sand, and thinking it was really pretty.  Much as I wanted it too, the voice didn’t repeat itself.  It certainly didn’t set any bushes alight, nor did a beautiful light shine down from the heavens and illuminate me.  All that was there was a beautiful pattern of iron ore in the sand at my feet.

The thing was, I simply could not convince myself that I hadn’t heard those words.  Perhaps it was because in that perfect moment, those words rang true.  I wasn’t just connecting with that place through the soles of my feet – I was connecting with the artist that had created that place.  The same artist that created me.

Since that day, I’ve come to accept that my perception of myself as “prayer-deficient” was, in a word, false.  I still can’t pray like my Grandpa, but I’ve realized that it’s because I wasn’t made to pray that way.  I pray… differently.  I pray through the simple act of quiet steps, by moving one foot at a time.  I pray by starting small journeys to quiet my mind, so that I can hear what my creator has to say to me.

For the first time in my life, I’ve discovered that I actually like to pray.

Don’t worry.  There will be more, and it’s actually going somewhere.  These are the first steps on a rather long road.

Till next time.