#12

II.

Habit becomes conviction, conviction becomes passion, and in passion, vocation becomes illuminated. Our vocations determine our paths; in this case, with hilarious literality.

The fastest I've ever walked a mile in a straight line is between seven and eight minutes, which is only a little slower than I can run one. The furthest I've ever walked in a day is somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five to forty-five miles. The type of walking is important context--one can place different value per mile depending on city traversal, country miles, mixed terrain, footing, load, humidity, altitude, and depending on adverse conditions, which can place us in the five to fifteen mile range when reckoning my more hardcore walks. The coldest temperatures I have ever dealt with on a walk were about negative fourteen degrees Celsius with negative thirty on the wind chill. The hottest day I've walked was about forty degrees. 

The high temperature was in the desert, east of Qatar. The lowest was right here at home. In Massachusetts I "walked" up an eighty-five degree grade, and in the Andes and in the Porcupine Mountains I carefully slid sideways down a similar slopes. In jungle, desert, swamp, cloud forest, cliff country, scrub, cities, suburbs, steppes, strips, railroad tracks, in unknown towns and neighborhoods and hundreds of times along the same haunts and pounds and efficient courses. O, to achieve as many more of my artless, scruffy, meandering walks in as many strange and wonderful places as I have the luck and wherewithal to reach in my limited wandering upon this wide and sacred Earth! 

I've walked with about a dozen different CD players and iPods, wearing a heaping variety of earbuds and regular little plastic headphones and big heavy noise-canceling wraparounds, wearing many years worth of messenger bags and backpacks crammed full over a lifetime of lugging the most absurd crap and cruft and enough loose sheets of paper to fill the winds of hurricane. Dozens of shoes and boots have been walked to pieces. I've needlessly carried trumpets, tubas, bass guitars, bags of books, athletic duffels full of gear, folders full of papers or paperback books tucked under one arm, simply to avoid a ride and walk instead--with a busted knee, with broken ribs, with smashed toes, in spite of migraines, through colds, in frightening fog, soaking rain, incredible stenches, driving winds loaded with particulate or shrieking, dangerous levels of noise, through clouds of midges and plagues of mosquitoes and streaking insanities of black flies, through long grass and close brush, weaving through dense copses far from the beaten path and standing out alone against the sky on a naked ridge, splashing through a ford or tripping across a bridge or balancing along a log over a creek. Alone and in the company of a whole biography of ghosts, and alone.

Thoughts come to you from different angles, old ways blooming into new improbabilities and gleaming realizations plunging like stars into the depths of your own unsounded knowledge. The way opens you up to insights and ideas that one cannot acquire unless one is afoot and plunging ahead, mindful without mind of the breath in the lungs and the wind and the sky. The sight and sound of all the birds and beasts and human persons and all the other living things and the inorganic bedrock and constructed scaffolding, all the angles and vectors and trajectories and fractals; all the new avenues to understanding the world you all walk through together, transforming one another, day after day. And the highest of all, the loss of self, the pure forgetfulness, the being caught up in the undifferentiated glory of creation, the infinite God within breathing coeval with the infinite God without, all boundaries sundered, all veils parted.

You never remember, because memory can't hold it. You can't say what you learn, because it is something you know, and knew, and will always know, and this knowledge is held in kind with knowledge held in the hearts of every soul that ever lived, but it isn't anything words can compass or draw into the world of symbols, because it isn't singular knowledge and it isn't interchangeable, but infinite, immutable, and absolutely silent.

Whispers of it make it into the songs that well up inside you, if you're lucky. You try to put it into the way you hold the people you love, when you're lucky enough to hold them. Into the heart you love in common. The best of your prayers. 



--JL