If we can we slow down
Walk quietly
Speak silently to the spirit of the water
If we can participate in ceremony daily
It becomes part of our being
Our conscious and subconscious
If we can disconnect from the harsh news of the day
Focus on the mist in the air at daybreak
Our voices rise together
To greet the sun
As we hold our asemaa
And sing to the four directions
ni mama Aki and all that there is
If we can slow down or withdraw slightly from our interactions with the world around us
We hasten our brain functionality, our capacity to feel and care for others
Including the flowers, the butterflies, the birds, and our spiritual growth accelerates
If our spiritual growth is a communal process
Our collective physical, emotional and spiritual growth
Is accelerated as we walk up and down the hills and byways along the river carrying the water or the staff and especially if our physical self is taxed in this process.
If the hills are larger, our tendency is to move faster and as we approach the confluence, we run, run, run. Together
We grow, we grow, we grow!
--Sharon Day 9/14/18

When I walk, I fall through three layers of experience. The first is all about the surface of my skin, the immediate feedback of my senses. It is often twitchy and uncomfortable: my boots are too tight; there’s a twig in my sock. My backpack won’t sit square on my shoulders. My walking is stop-start in that phase, curtailed by an endless series of adjustments. I am never sure if I really want to go the distance. But if I walk on through that, those sensations eventually fade and they’re replaced by bubbling thought, a burgeoning of ideas and insights, a sense of joyous chatter in the mind. This is the point in a walk when the interior of my mind feels luxuriant, a place so pleasurable to inhabit that I never want my legs to stop. It’s a creative space, a place where problems are solved in unfathomable ways, the answers arriving like truths known all along.

If I carry on walking, eventually that fades, too. Perhaps it is low blood sugar, or perhaps the popcorn brain burns itself out eventually, but at some point I reach a very different state of mind, a place beyond words in which I feel quiet and empty. This is my favourite phase of all, an open space in which I am nothing for a while, just an existence with moving parts and a map in my hand, whose feet know the route and do not need my interference. Nothing happens here, or so it seems. But in its aftermath, I find my most profound insights, whole shifts in the meanings and understandings that underpin who I am. In this state, I am an open door.