Browsed by
Category: walking

Each Day

Each Day

Comments 0 Comment

Walking an older doggie first thing in the morning has its minuses. I’d much rather let the day unravel slowly, in fuzzy robe and slippers, staying inside and writing or reading until I’ve been awake for an hour or two.

But walking an older doggie first thing has its pluses, too, and that’s what I’m thinking about today.  Being out early, when the day is just beginning, means I can take a measure of it, can sniff out its aromas, attend to its sounds. A little less bird song, a little less humidity, a lot more sunshine.

Being out early helps me understand that each day is a gift — one that we can relish or ignore.

Walking Tall

Walking Tall

Comments 0 Comment

It was an aha moment made possible by a liberal arts education, and it happened in the biology lab. While dissecting the brain of a fetal pig I came across the pineal gland, located between the two hemispheres and thought by some (including Descartes) to be the seat of the soul. I had just been reading Descartes in my philosophy class, and the fact that I was now seeing that very gland (albeit a tiny porcine version of it) made my heart skip a beat.

I still pay attention to things like this, strange connections and coincidences when the fates seem to be saying, listen up … this is important.

What I’ve been noting lately — both from Becca, the physical therapist I’ve been seeing, and reading in Sarah Kaufamn’s The Art of Grace (more later about this fine book) — is the importance of good posture.

Posture is a foundation for moving gracefully, Kaufman writes, and good posture provides an uplifting feeling. This was seconded by Becca, who tells me that in the process of tightening my core I should concentrate on being pulled up, that this will counteract a tendency to collapse in the midsection that can irritate the spine and cause sciatic flare-ups.

“If you watch people walk,” Kaufman writes, “most of us sink into our hips. … There should be a comfortable tension in the torso, lifting the abdomen and hips against gravity while helping relax and easing shoulders down slightly.”

The fates have spoken  — and I’m trying to walk tall.

Frosted Fields

Frosted Fields

Comments 0 Comment

An early walk on a Reston trail, one of my favorites. This is a paved path that winds between backyards and parkland before connecting with the Cross-County Trail. It’s cool and enticing in the summer because of the tall oaks that shade it — and no less lovely in the winter.

It was a quiet amble —  not a soul about — and the stillness rang in my ears. Birds fluttered in the hedges, and the stream, normally gurgling, was quiet in the cold. It was chilly, so I walked fast from the get-go, flipping up the hood on my parka and balling up my fists inside old gloves.

But three quarters of the way down on the left, I had to stop. The wetland landscape there was transformed by frost. Matted grasses gleamed with white and broken tree trunks loomed above them. There was thin ice where the creek water ponds and a monochromatic beauty throughout.

Beauty is always welcome, but never more than when it is unexpected.

Blog, in a Nutshell

Blog, in a Nutshell

Comments 0 Comment

Sometimes it all comes back like the rekindling of an old passion — the reason I started this blog, which is the walking and what it leads to, the new ideas, a fresh way of looking at something. Though I post about books and music and writing and more, it was walking that started it and walking that energizes it still.

No surprise this came to me yesterday, when the air felt more like spring than fall and a pair of doves rose up and fluttered off as I strode too close to them. I heard geese, too, a flock that has decided to winter here, I guess.

The light was soft and the scenery, to quote Hemingway, a movable feast, and I gobbled it up as I ambled past. Thoughts floated by, some of them even worth keeping. So I rushed home and wrote them down. And there you have it — the blog, in a nutshell.

Walking to Georgia

Walking to Georgia

Comments 0 Comment

On my getaway last month I briefly hiked the Appalachian Trail. I passed it quickly on the way up to an advertised 360-degree view, which was more like 345, since to reach the ultimate pinnacle required a little more rock scrambling than I wanted to do. But on the way back to the car, the AT was there and I was game.

But first, I had to decide: would I head to Maine … or Georgia? A silly way to put it, of course, since I wouldn’t be walking to either one, wouldn’t even be on the trail itself for more than a few minutes.

Making the choice made me think, though. Despite all we hear about it being the journey not the destination that matters, endpoints make a difference. They shift the way we think about a trip. They color the journey.

In the end, the sun was slanting more fetchingly to the south, so that’s what I chose. This is what I saw. Not Georgia … but not bad.

Headlamp Stroll

Headlamp Stroll

Comments 0 Comment

Wearing a headlamp on this morning’s early walk with Copper, I felt like a Cyclops treading my suburban lane. It’s a strange sensation to emit light from your forehead — both convenient and powerful, even vaguely godlike.

But mostly, it’s freeing, which means I can better juggle leash and doggie bag and still have one hand tucked in my pocket because, well, it’s freezing cold out there.


In this season of light, when homes are decked out in garlands of white and colored bulbs, when my eyes search the darkness for the faintest trace of dawn, it feels good to emit light, as if within my own frail human self I carry what hope and heart I need. This is not true, of course. I know how much I need others. But for a moment, in the dark, it felt otherwise. 
Walking and Looking

Walking and Looking

Comments 0 Comment

It was a skill I perfected when I lived and walked in New York City: When faced with a pedestrian barreling right at me, I learned to quickly glance down. To keep eye contact meant we’d likely find ourselves in one of those awkward dances where one heads right thinking the other will head left, only he heads right too. Looking down breaks the cycle and avoids collisions.

This behavior would not surprise Alexandra Horowitz. In her book On Looking, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, she describes pedestrian behavior as quick, fluid and fish-like. It depends on three basic rules (alignment, avoidance and following the person in front of you) plus a series of quick calculations made because we pay attention to each other.

Most of the time, people look where they are going. So the gaze is the giveaway. You can even follow someone’s head, because people actually incline in the direction they want to go.

The one type of pedestrian that breaks this rule: the phone talker. “Their conversational habits change the dynamic of the flowing shoal,” Horowitz writes. “No longer is each fish aware, in a deep, old-brain way, of where everyone is around him.”

And this means that my looking-away skill doesn’t work as well anymore.  Which is something I already knew, in my deep, old-brain way.

Drip Drip

Drip Drip

Comments 0 Comment

I was already writing another blog post for today … and then I stepped outside.

It was the very definition of a “misty moisty morning,” warmer since yesterday’s cold rain, but still delightfully soggy with cloud swaths and drip-drips and absolutely no reason to be outdoors. Unless, of course, you have a dog who needs a walk.

And because I do, I was thrust out into this watery world, there to admire the droplets of water that grace the tips of each weeping cherry bough. They glittered, these droplets; they looked like the tiniest of flashlights, or maybe the ends of lighted scopes.

Undoubtedly there is physics at work here, surface tension perhaps, or maybe even something that involves an equation. All I know is that each droplet seemed so fabulously close to bursting that the sheer improbability of that made me smile.

Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash

Moonset

Moonset

Comments 0 Comment

I woke early yesterday, as I do these days. Woke to a bright world, a full moon, and a persistent one. Even though the sky was lightening in the east, the moon was hanging on, slightly mottled with a haze of clouds, but still there.

It was strong enough to throw shadows on cars and houses — but soft enough to preserve the pre-dawn hush. It shined on a sleeping suburban world, utterly still, with frosted leaves that glittered in the grass.

In much of the world, moonlight matters. It’s the difference between seeing and stumbling. I thought about that as I walked west, into the moonset.

Listening In

Listening In

Comments 0 Comment

While I consider myself a law-abiding citizen, I do enjoy eavesdropping. The act of listening in on a conversation is usually not criminal, of course, but it can be. I like to think I keep the habit in check.

Nevertheless, if I’m out to dinner I sometimes listen harder to the conversation at the next table than I do to my own.  This is not an admirable trait, but I can’t help myself. Maybe it’s the writer in me, the observer. But maybe that’s just an excuse.

This morning I realized how much I eavesdrop while walking (walks dropping?), having harvested two juicy bits of dialogue just on today’s stroll from train to office:

“It was real Louisiana gumbo,” said one camo-clad soldier to another as a group of them breezed past me as I emerged from Metro.

The other was uttered by a top-coated, loafer-wearing man who was striding beside me down a Crystal City street.  “Yes,” he said into his phone. “Northern Macedonia.”

Ah, the tales one could spin from these tidbits. But alas, I have other work to do, so for now, these snippets will remain … just snippets.