The Spiritual Alchemy of Walking

I LOVE TO walk. I came by this love naturally. My mother, now well into her 80s, is a dedicated walker, spending at least 30 minutes each evening walking on her treadmill. In earlier years, especially when the winds of the Kansas plains died down late in the day, she would walk the half-mile dirt road to our mailbox and back.

I’ve added three Labrador retrievers to my walking ritual — Hershey, Pippi, and Rue — who delight in a daily routine of getting outside, noses to the ground, tails in the air, ears perked and attuned. Responding to the rattle of their leash, each one’s anticipation is uniquely their own — a hop, a tail whipping against my leg, a wet nose urgently working to get the collar in place.

In recent years, after experiencing the awe of walking in the Pacific Northwest, where lush forests and rippling rivers drew my husband and me to their sacred cathedrals, we have started structuring vacations around where we want to hike. Step after step, we take in nature’s altars, praying with our feet, ingesting nature’s elements in holy, full-bodied communion.

In her book Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, Katherine May articulates what I feel when I’m walking. Enchantment, she writes, evokes a deep knowing that “something is there, something vast and wise and beautiful that pervades all of life. Something that is present, attentive, behind the everyday. A frequency of consciousness at the low end of the dial, amid the static. A stratum of experience waiting to be uncovered.” This is precisely why I have taken my worship on the road.

The Bible is replete with people who go walking and end up finding themselves in the process. Patriarch Abram, for example, was called to leave his home in Ur and walk to a new place in a more fertile valley where he made his new home with Sarai. Or consider the ancient Israelites who escaped the oppressive Egyptian pharaoh — and walked in the desert for a generation. Also don’t forget one of the Bible’s most familiar walks: the one taken by Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi. While the narrator shares few details of their journey, their trek from the hinterlands back to Naomi’s hometown must have been an adventure of dangerous proportions.

Walking requires a willingness to leave one place and go to another. And somewhere along the road, in the liminality of “not-there-yet,” transformation becomes possible. Abraham and Sarah gain new names, grow old together and, when they least expect it, start a family that changes the course of history. Although Moses leads the Israelites out from under their harsh treatment, he and the community are forced to wander in the wilderness and reckon with the fact that some of them will not live to see the Promised Land. And Naomi, a mother who has become embittered by life’s realities, discovers over the course of her journey that family can include non-blood relatives and those who come from different ethnic backgrounds.

Jesus’ followers were also walkers, with their dusty sandals and desert itineraries. I’ve long been impressed by the spontaneity of their walking, as they dropped their nets and left everything behind to follow a ragtag leader. The disciples’ impromptu decision to relinquish their livelihoods has always struck me as one of the biggest miracles of the Bible. They didn’t even pack a bag for their walkabout, although they surely slipped a few fish and some bread into their pouches — enough to share.

So the cliché about journeys is true: It’s not about the destination, especially when we are attuned to the spiritual alchemy they offer. In releasing our white-knuckle grip on what we think we know and striking out on an unfamiliar path, we become open to transformative vistas, both inward and expansive. These visions are impossible to conceive if we never leave home.

Frédéric Gros, in A Philosophy of Walking, describes three stages of liberation that occur when we walk. The first is freedom from momentary demands. In a short walk, we can put distance between us and the phone call we need to make, the upcoming meeting, the project that must be completed. A longer walk yields a second and more substantial stage of liberation by helping us evaluate the identity we’ve worked so hard to create. Is this really who I am? Who do I really want to be when no one is looking? In this second stage, as days stretch out and our normal pace has shifted, we can peel away our masks, the ones that hide us even from ourselves.

Finally, Gros suggests a third liberating stage. Here, by undertaking the most substantial walks — pilgrimages — we finally create the necessary time and space to come face-to-face with the ways in which we attach ourselves to false versions of who we are. With sustained distance from our routines and responsibilities, we begin to understand that the ways we make ourselves into a “success” by our cultures’ standards may, in fact, result in a diminishment of life rather than flourishing.

A few years ago, my husband and I traveled to the small Swiss village of Sils-Maria to walk in the Fex Valley, where the German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche — a committed walker — spent several summers. While there, we became acquainted with a traveler from Zurich who spends her annual holiday in the valley to walk among the wildflowers with the snow-capped Alps encircling her.

The Swiss woman joined us for dinner one evening at the family inn, and we shared stories from our lives, layering texture and tone to broad outlines of what had led us to this place. After dessert, we headed outside where we had heard we would be able to see the local fox, affectionately called “Foxy.” Sure enough, when dusk took hold of the sky, Foxy sauntered out from the tall grass, observing us while she ate her nightly meal. In retrospect, Foxy’s presence at just this moment may have been a signpost of holy encounter.

It was an unexpected, extraordinary evening, one where bread and wine in an enchanted place became the sinew of connection and belonging. Our new Swiss friend confessed that before meeting us, she had assumed all Americans were as mean-spirited and selfish as some of our leaders, but now she knew there were people like us. We, too, had arrived with our own expectations, in our case about where we’d find nature’s beauty. We hadn’t assumed that our most beautiful encounter would be inside, in a dimly lit room with a stranger.

When we said our goodbyes early the following morning, all of us left with something new; our hearts were full of hope, our spirits lighter and brighter. The unfamiliar path led us right where we needed to be. It’s the alchemy of walking.