It Takes a Dream

If you’ve never experienced the beauty of a rain forest, start with the Hall of Mosses Trail in Olympic National Park. For both beauty and adventure in Wyoming, you can’t do better than the journey to Inspiration Point via the Jenny Lake Boat Shuttle. And for my dollar, the Sylvan Lake Trail in the Black […]

“Walking is life in miniature,” wrote Suzy Cripps (The Joy of Walking 2020). “To pay attention to walking is to pay attention to life itself.” We English teachers would say walking is a metaphor for life. Understand one, and you’ll better understand the other. And maybe that understanding can translate into practice. If you get […]

“From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes,” wrote the American journalist/essayist Christopher Morley. You do not have to be a Meriwether Lewis or William Clark to discover something new. Their eyes were not the first to see the American West. When we see things on […]

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit says that walking “allows you to find what you don’t know you are looking for, and you don’t know a place until it surprises you.” I would have said “you don’t know what you are looking for until it surprises you.” Like the twin fawns, still in […]

“To learn something new, take the path today that you took yesterday” wrote naturalist John Burroughs. In The Magic of Walking (Simon and Schuster 1980) Aaron Sussman and Ruth Goode agreed: “Even the same walk, the one we may take every day, is never the same from one day to another.” Of course they aren’t: […]

What is it about a sunrise that gives me hope? Saw one today on my morning walk. The rich reds and purples mixed with pastel pinks seemed painted on the underside of white, wispy clouds, all set against a clear blue Texas Panhandle sky. Doesn’t get much prettier. But it’s not the beauty that fans […]

“You do not complain to a beautiful morning,” wrote Walter Teller in his book Area Code 215. I resonate with the sentiment. There’s something about a morning walk, especially when the weather cooperates, that lifts my spirits. Annabel Streets (52 Ways to Walk) says it’s the sunlight, which is the primary timekeeper for our body’s […]

“When we walk,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or mall?” It would have gone without saying in the 18th and 19th centuries. There were no indoor shopping malls or fitness centers with gyms or, worse still, […]

“He walks best who walks alone, wrote the British author H. F. Ellis. Many other writers concurr. “One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey,” wrote William Hazlitt, “but I like to do it [by] myself.” Similarly, Genevan philosopher Jacques Rousseau, Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson and American naturalist Henry […]