Aug 22, 2021
My morning walk: a blessing and a prayer
I don’t need to ask permission from anyone to walk out of my door into the wilderness. I just put my coat over my pyjamas and pull on my walking shoes and off I go into the mountain air.
Technically, I’m walking in the sky. Well, we all are really. Glued by gravity to Mothership Earth in our beautiful bubble.
My walk. My space. A blessing and a prayer.
I walk because I can. I am safe, free, my very own self choosing where each step will take me. Take a right at the school, down to the river, along to the little donkey, back up to the Elder and past the Chapel where I can pop my head in to say, “Hello, it’s me. Thank you for my life.”
I walk without fear, as a prayer for those who cannot. As Kabul falls. As veils come down. As we all unequivocably make ourselves climate migrants.
I walk for the sheer joy of being outside in this cathedral of trees, feeling the weight of mountain wisdom pressing up through my feet, living through me. The mountain is my heart space, the stillness in the blue and the green, where I find my own light that I am supposed to shine in the world.
“What wants to live through me today?” I ask the river.
“Love. Love wants to live through you today,” she replies, chuckling her way over the stones in an endless cycle of flowing. “No need to push me,” she says, “Love is a wave.”
I walk on the days that I don’t want to. Tired, slow, sleepy footsteps. Glad that I’m not carrying the river on my back.
I walk on the days that I am heartbroken that my beloved does not recognise me in this life, telling his name to the trees that are breathing us, asking them to whisper into his ear that I am longing for him to come to me.
I walk through the forest of larch and pine. Stepping into their community of being, eating wild berries as I go…blueberries, strawberries, raspberries…tiny globes of abundance.
As legend has it, the larch is the ladder to heaven and from which the souls of shaman are born.
“How did we forget when we were once trees?” I ask myself.
I walk under the full moon, as she lights up the silhouettes of the mountains as they scrape the Universe. To the edge of the village lights, hoping that the wolf beyond doesn’t fancy me for supper tonight. Love is much like the moon; I do not have to see her to know that she is there.
I walk to journey back into my truest self; so that I can find the courage to walk into the world with the belief that love wins all bets.
In each footstep, I carry love like a light, blinking like Morse Code as a signal to other revolutionaries that we must show up as we are, imperfectly perfect, believing that we can save our souls.
