Read the following passages and think about what Edward Hirsch might mean with his suggestion, which I mentioned at the end of the lecture for week one:
A walk is a way of entering the body, and also of leaving it.
What does this mean? How can moving be a way of both entering and leaving the body? Hirsch follows up with these lines:
I am both here and there, betwixt and between, strolling along, observing things, thinking of something else.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, “Running as Prayer,” the writer and runner Jamie Quatro also describes this entering and leaving of a body that sometimes, but not always, happens when she runs:
I’m intensely aware of the cadence of a bird’s song, cherry blossoms weighted-down after a rain. Things light up and I experience an interior stillness that somehow syncs me more profoundly with the exterior world. It’s a paradox: only when I’m fully present in my body do I begin to experience the absence of myself.
And the runner and poet, Thomas Gardner, writes in one of his entries about his run in Poverty Creek Journal:
I’ve been feeling my way all week toward some still-unstated problem, running without a watch, not tracking my thoughts, trying to let the run distill itself down to breath, or rhythm, or attention–a single maple leaf suspended in a web, five feet over the trail. It’s hard to do. Thoughts rise and rattle, spread their wings, legs trailing them over the pond (Poverty Creek Journal, 35).
Describing what walking does to us, Frederic Gros writes:
You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the path, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind (84).
Finally, returning to Jamie Quatro:
the more aware we become of only the breath flowing through and supporting the body, the less the stories of the self, created in our heads, seem to matter.
To be both here and there, experiencing an interior stillness that somehow syncs you more profoundly with an exterior world. Intensely aware of the cadence of a bird’s song, of breath, or rhythm, or attention. Feeling the absence of a self, and the presence of a body who feels sharp stones on the path and the breath flowing through it, who follows thoughts over the pond as they rise and rattle and spread their wings.
Have you ever experienced this entering and leaving on your walks or runs?