A Walk, By Nature
Walking along the sunbeam of a walk.
A Walk, By Nature
A walk by nature is surely slow.
Aging oaks and wilding greens.
Know that any sound will echo?
Do you hear the hushes in between?
The trees betray the wind-ing path,
Waving away the felt unseen.
The chirps, the flutters, the light-full bath.
Am I the only wandering?
If a walk by nature is anything,
A walk by nature is surely slow.
Step after step we're moved so slightly,
Yet the slow in our go lumens brightly.
But if hurried along-what we'd gain in the distance
We'd lose in the song.
Clear is not our sight,
A longing to see with purer eyes.
The striking of our delight?
Those snapping spectacles.
If a walk by nature is anything,
A walk by nature is surely slow.
Your finger charts our gaze,
And in the moving we're moved.
Your voice spells straight our ways.
But if hurried along-
Our rot is proved.
We see not up ahead,
And know not what You do.
But as long as You remain,
Knowing and known will be us too.
The hushes turn to whispers.
The whispers into nudge.
The glaring glint of light above,
Your grace fills up our cup.
If this walk, by nature, is anything,
This walk, by nature, is surely s-l-o-w. Faulty Pacing
Unless chased by a ferocious animal (like one of my children) my walks by nature are slow. Walking. Is by nature a slow movement. The moment the pace picks up, it ceases to be a walk. Or it ceases to be walking. A walk with God as I’m painfully learning is, by nature, slow.
The irony of hurry is that we wish we could slow down. The irony of halted-ness is we wish we could begin moving. It seems that even the standard rhythms for pacing ourselves are uncalibrated.
The Inspiration
This poem was inspired in part by reflecting on the somewhat common statement that Christians use “our walk with God”. Its inherent slowness caught me by surprise. Walking obviously implies slow. But my knowing of and union with God? Hardly seems slow and walk-like. And yet it is.
It was also inspired in part by a walk I took with my sons. Their attention to sticks and creeks, dirt and trees all bring forth conversation. Their seeing is always relational before it is informational. What they point out is hardly ever for mere observation, it’s for beckoning attention and heralding some sort of WOW-NESS to a rather ‘ordinary’ thing. Their seeing and their walking is a harsh rebuke to how I often see and walk.
The Rot
I don’t revolt against cars and trains. But they have impacted negatively what it means to see. Especially to see when i’m moved slowly.
I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given to me… The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it 'annihilates space.' It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventures than his grandfather got from traveling ten. (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy)
I wonder how much Adam & Eve saw as they walked with God in the Garden. How much fatherly observation did God make for them? What sort of naturey things did they point out to one another? How alive did Eden’s air smell?
And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:8 KVJ)
It’s a sad reflection. The trees, once meant to backdrop their paradise, now became their shelter of shame. The walk they enjoyed now became a hurried alarm for hiding. More than one sort of walking was lost in the Fall. I’m hopeful that all sorts of walking are recovered in Christ.
The Sunbeam
The Sunbeam here along this walk was that the slow of a walk restored the simplistic joy of the nature of a walk. To be as natural as a bird flying with its wings or a fish swimming with its fins is man walking with his legs. Ironically, I write this suffering from a back injury making me incapable of taking a step without pain.
Happy Walking!
I absolutely love this post, both the poem and prose! I’ve been thinking often about this lately, the sadness of the obsession with vehicles and moving along with speed. In a somewhat joking yet also true way, I think the highway through the city might be one of the most destructive parts of a city, since it does not allow you to feel any sense of community within where you are at. The city of Louisville, (where I am currently at) is transition piece as I move from point a to b. Yet walking more places often makes us remember the beauty of space, slowness, and, even, paradoxically, adventure! It is the both at the same time the most homeward bound yet dangerous thing you can do. You never know, as Bilbo says, where the wind might take you. My apologies for the rant, but this is all to say, excellent post!
This really stuck out at me: "I don’t revolt against cars and trains. But they have impacted negatively what it means to see." How true that is! Some years back, I went down a pretty deep rabbit hole with photography. I brought my camera with me everywhere, and it taught me invaluable lessons about slowing down and training my eyes to see like I did as a child, when everything felt new. Everything becoming humdrum and ordinary is a product of our own internal rules and formulas for interpretation—the filtering helps us get through our day more efficiently. But nothing's ever as mundane as we perceive it to be.
Your poem reminded me of Japanese gardens—how the pathways are constructed to deliberately break up the pace and cadence of our walking, so that we're encouraged to slow down and not settle into a routine during our visit. A good practice to keep in mind.
Thanks for sharing the poem and the discussion; lots to think about there.