Walking my Druidry
Walking has long been a key part of my spiritual life. It’s how I connect with the landscape and engage with the living world around me. There can be enchantment in moments of beauty, and close contact with wild things. There can be inspiration from all of that, and also from the way the rhythm of movement loosens up my mind. Time with trees, sun, wind, water and sky has beneficial effects on my mental health, calming and soothing me. It won’t always fix everything, but I can count on it to take the edge off.
There is a process that only happens if I’m out and walking for a long time – at least four hours, maybe more. It’s not something that’s always available to me because I don’t reliably have the energy for the massive walks and I can’t do them in very cold or wet weather. However, when I can, I notice distinct shifts in my mental states. Over time, the landscape opens me up. It opens my heart, takes down my defences, makes me soft, tender and open to everything around me. It is a euphoric feeling and brings with it a sense of great kinship and involvement. Stripped back in this way, I feel like part of the landscape, not an observer of it.
The defences come from dealing with people. There is nothing in a landscape I need to protect myself from. Yes, there are things that could hurt my body, and I need to be careful, and mindful of hazards, but that’s very different. I can move at my own speed and act on my own terms. I usually walk with my husband, and so we talk as we walk, but that’s also gentle and open and spacious. There is no effort involved. Thoughts and conversations arise and flow as they will, and sometimes we have nothing to say and that’s also fine.
Being in the landscape in this way has taught me a lot about what I want from my human relationships. I want to be able to hold that same open awareness. I want to be soft and unguarded and relaxed about being affected by what I encounter. It’s much harder to do that with people, and much less safe. But at the same time, I’m starting to feel that if I can be more landscape-led in what I do, and treat the human risks with the same untroubled respect I have for steep banks, slippery surfaces and sunstroke, I might be able to do things very differently. If I can find ways to listen more to the land without having to spend hours peeling off armour, perhaps I can find better ways of going into human space.
