Walking as Devotion:
What Happens When We Walk Not to Arrive, but to Notice?
Lately I have been thinking deeply about walking. Not walking for exercise, though golly I need more of that also!. Not walking to accomplish something. Not walking to get somewhere. But walking as a form of focus. Walking as relationship. Walking as devotion.
There is something that happens when we slow our pace enough for the world to begin speaking back.
A shift occurs.
The nervous system relaxes. The senses widen. What was once background begins to emerge: the flicker of sunlight through the leaves, the smell of damp earth, the small plant leaning toward a path, the sound of my own breath.
In a culture shaped by urgency, walking slowly can feel almost radical. We are conditioned to move efficiently, to optimize, to arrive. But the living world does not reveal itself through speed. Relationship asks something different of us.
What if walking was not about reaching a destination, but about entering into conversation? The Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh (Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life (1991)) wrote:
“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
I return to this often as it speaks to a quality of care and reciprocity that feels increasingly necessary in our time, a way of moving through the world rooted not in domination or urgency, but in reverence. Writer Rebecca Solnit, in her beautiful book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, reminds us that:
“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.”
Perhaps this is part of what so many of us are longing for: not simply exercise or escape, but reunion. A way back into relationship with our bodies, with place, and with the living world itself.
Many traditions throughout history have understood walking this way. For some, walking has been a spiritual practice. Pilgrims walked sacred routes not simply to arrive at holy places, but to be transformed by the journey itself. Buddhist walking meditation treats each step as an act of awareness and presence.
For others, walking became an act of resistance and collective change. In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi led the Salt March across India, transforming walking into a form of political and spiritual action. The march unfolded slowly through villages and communities, step by step, embodying simplicity, discipline, and solidarity. Walking itself became the message.
There are also those who devoted their entire lives to walking as spiritual path. Peace Pilgrim, an American peace activist and mystic, walked more than 25,000 miles across the United States carrying only the clothes she wore and a commitment to peace. She described walking as a practice of inner transformation, simplicity, and trust.
Walking has also long been tied to philosophy, creativity, and perception. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle taught while walking. Writers like Henry David Thoreau and Matsuo Bashō wandered as a way of thinking, observing, and encountering the world more deeply.
I also find myself drawn to the ancient practice of walking the labyrinth. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth does not ask us to solve anything. There is no trick, no dead end, no need to perform intelligence or efficiency. Instead, it offers a single winding path inward and outward again — a journey of presence, reflection, and return.
As someone shaped by Greek ancestry and Mediterranean ways of understanding land, ritual, and embodiment, I feel a deep resonance with these ancient pathways. The labyrinth carries echoes of myth, pilgrimage, initiation, and cyclical time. Walking it becomes less about arriving somewhere external and more about entering into dialogue with oneself, the body, and the unseen.
Perhaps this is part of why walking continues to matter so deeply to me. Beneath all the different forms: pilgrimage, protest, meditation, artistic practice, wandering there remains a shared understanding that walking can alter consciousness. That rhythm and repetition can soften the mind enough for something quieter and older to emerge.
Artists, too, have used walking as both medium and methodology. Pilgrims walked sacred routes not simply to arrive at holy places, but to be transformed by the journey itself. Buddhist walking meditation treats each step as an act of awareness. Artists like Hamish Fulton describe walking itself as the artwork. Indigenous traditions around the world have long held walking as a form of relationship, memory, and reciprocity with land.
I keep returning to a quote by the walking artist Hamish Fulton:
“No walk, no work.”
For Fulton, the walk itself is the art. Not the photograph afterward. Not the object. Not the documentation. The lived encounter. The body moving through landscape. The attention given.
This resonates deeply with my own evolving practice.
When I was in my early twenties, I became obsessed with the journals and story of Everett Ruess — the young wanderer, writer, printmaker, and nomad who disappeared in the American Southwest in 1934 at the age of twenty. I carried his words with me for years.
There was something about his devotion to wandering, solitude, beauty, and direct encounter with landscape that deeply shaped me. Long before I had language for practices like ecological art, relational awareness, or attentive presence, I recognized in his writings a longing I also carried: the desire to live closely with the land and to allow movement through place to become a form of inner transformation.
Ruess once wrote:
“I have been thinking, dreaming, wandering outdoors. Here is the core of my life.”
As a young artist, herbalist, and seeker, those words felt like permission.
Looking back now, I can see how many threads of my current work were already forming there , the relationship between walking and perception, wandering and creativity, solitude and belonging, image-making and lived experience.
Over time, I began to understand that walking was nourishing something even deeper. Not only my creative and spiritual life, but my body and nervous system as well. As an herbalist, I’ve come to see walking as one of the oldest, simplest, and most accessible forms of medicine available to us.
Long before walking became branded as fitness or self-improvement, humans walked as part of daily life: through forests, across fields, between villages, alongside seasonal rhythms. Our bodies evolved in relationship to movement through landscape.
Modern research continues to affirm what many traditions have long understood intuitively: walking supports cardiovascular health, circulation, digestion, nervous system regulation, mood, sleep, and cognitive clarity. Even brief periods of walking outdoors have been shown to reduce stress hormones and support emotional well-being. Contemporary practices like Japanese forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) echo older understandings that slow, attentive time in nature can be deeply restorative to both body and mind.
(Great interview w/ Maira Kalman)
But beyond all the measurable benefits, I’ve come to recognize walking as essential to my own mental and creative balance.
As someone with a highly ADHD mind, walking helps me focus in a way few other things can. When thoughts feel scattered or overstimulated, walking creates rhythm and priorities settle. Ideas untangle themselves. The body begins to metabolize excess energy and mental noise. Often, what feels impossible indoors becomes workable once I begin moving.
I suspect this is part of why walking has accompanied so many artists, philosophers, mystics, and wanderers throughout history. Movement seems to organize thought differently than stillness. The mind loosens. Attention widens. Something begins to flow again.
And perhaps this is another quiet form of devotion: trusting that clarity does not always arrive through force, but sometimes simply through putting one foot in front of the other.
Over the years, both my herbal work and my art practice have slowly shifted away from extraction and toward relationship. I am less interested in mastering the natural world than in learning how to encounter it differently. As herbalists, artists, and plant lovers, we are often taught to identify, categorize, harvest, and understand. These things matter. But I also wonder:
What happens before naming? What happens when we simply stay awhile? What becomes possible when attention itself is the practice?
Walking has become one of the ways I return myself to this question. Noticing how pace shapes perception. How certain plants seem to appear repeatedly when I slow down. How the body begins to remember that it belongs to a larger living system.
Sometimes I think of walking as a kind of threshold practice. A way of crossing from the highly managed world of schedules, screens, and productivity into something older, slower, and more reciprocal.
In this way, walking becomes less about movement and more about listening.
This is the spirit behind my upcoming class:
Walking as Devotion: A Practice of Attentive Presence
Western Ma Herbal Symposium May 9th Montague MA
In this experiential gathering, we will explore walking not as a way to get somewhere, but as a practice of relationship with the living world. Through slow, intentional movement and guided sensory invitations, we’ll shift from simply identifying plants to encountering them: listening with the body, noticing subtle invitations, and attuning to the quiet forms of communication unfolding around us.
Together we’ll explore how pace shapes perception, how attention ripples through the nervous system, and how simple rituals of presence can deepen connection with place.
This class is open to plant lovers, artists, and the simply curious.
No special knowledge is needed. Only a willingness to slow down enough to notice.
Two more upcoming weekend workshops with space:
Ancestral Folds: Storytelling through Chinese Thread Book
Shepherd and Maudsleigh Studio, Newton
on May 16 and 17th
A book made of folds.
A container for memories
In this workshop, we learn the art of the Zhen Xian Bao, a traditional Chinese thread book once used by women to carry the intimate tools of daily life. These intricate folded books were historically used to store sewing tools and small treasures and we’ll reimagine them as personal keepsakes.
Telling Stories in Blue: Cyanotype Artist Books with Drum-Leaf Binding
June 2–5 | Provincetown Art Association and Museum
What if your time in Provincetown became a book?
In this hands-on workshop, we gather, print, and assemble transforming fleeting moments into deep blue impressions. Working with cyanotype we’ll create images using sunlight, water, found materials, botanicals, and personal imagery.
We’ll then transform these prints into a handmade artist book using a drum-leaf binding, developed by Timothy Ely. This elegant structure opens completely flat, allowing your images to flow seamlessly across spreads creating a visual narrative held in sequence.
Won’t you meet me in Provincetown
“Footnotes for Wanderers”
Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
A Winter Walk by Henry David Thoreau
How to Walk by Thich Nhat Hanh
Joy of Walking edited by Suzy Cripps.
The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism by Geoff Nicholson
Walking Art Practice : Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths - Ernesto Pujol
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London Lauren Elkin (Author),
Book of Walks by Deb Todd Wheeler
The Old Ways – Robert Macfarlane
Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work In Her Own Words
Walking as Embodied Worldmaking Bodies, borders and knowledgescapes by Lea Maria Spahn
A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros
A couple of extra reads!
https://www.newyorker.com/recommends/read/wanderlust-by-rebecca-solnit
https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/06/03/wanderlust-rebecca-solnit-walking/
A recent conversation with this semesters artist mentor Dannielle Tegeder of Hilmas Ghost (check out this amazing article on Hyperallergic) led to a new artist book on walking to add to my collection “Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967--2017 by Rachel Adams
In order to have peace and joy, you must succeed in having peace within each of your steps. Your steps are the most important thing.
'- Thich Nhat Hanh
Thanks. A great reminder!
I loved every word of this!