This is the last of a series of 4 blog posts, identifying some landscape features of walks, and suggesting some activities and dialogues to engage in, inspired by the names of these features. This article covers letters S-Z.
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This is the third in a series of 4 blog posts, cataloguing some common features of walks, and suggesting some activities and dialogues to engage in, inspired by metaphors of these features. This article covers letters M-R.
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This is the second in a series of 4 blog posts, cataloguing alphabetically some of the common features of walks, and suggesting some simple invitations of topics to examine whilst experiencing these features. This blog post covers G-L.
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This is the first in a series of 4 blog posts, cataloguing some of the common features of walks, and suggesting some simple invitations of topics to examine whilst experiencing these features. Since I couldn’t think of a more straight-forward way to arrange these ideas, they are listed in alphabetical order, so this blog post will deal with A-F.
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The words we use affect the way we feel, the way we behave and the way we experience life. We live into the words which we put to the concepts floating round our heads. As a literary geek, I absolutely love a thesaurus. In this article I take a look at the different synonyms for the word ‘walk’ and decide that we words we choose really do matter.
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This article addresses the ‘how’ of ‘how does wilderness therapy work’ in a practical sense; what is wilderness therapy, how is it structured, what does it really entail and what does it actually look like on the ground. I have also included a list of wilderness therapy organisations in the UK.
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“When I go for a walk it’s just a walk. But for you it’s more than that, isn’t it?” said my mum recently. Well, no, not really. It’s still just a walk. But I think there’s a lot to a walk; the name given to the physical mechanics of it being by far the least interesting part. The movement of walking largely takes care of itself, becoming, literally, a vehicle for everything else that that easy, natural, silent self-propelled locomotion facilitates: thinking, talking, humming, noticing, breathing, gazing, reflecting, meditating and … doing nothing. Doing the thing that defines us as human beings is an excellent means for us to stop doing and enjoy just being human.
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Looking back to our own rose-tinted childhoods, we can see the inter-generational difference in recreational pursuits and the connection to poor mental health amongst the young people we parent, teach and support. I set myself the delightful task of consciously recalling, in chronological order if possible, all my unstructured, unsupervised Nature Immersion Childhood Experiences. And my goodness what a joy it was simply to recollect them. Wordsworth was right!
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Mankind has always walked and talked; it’s what separates us from other mammals. And I expect since our earliest days we have found the spaciousness of a long walk, and the ease of a side-by-side movement conducive to a certain kind of talk. Out on our walk, under the open skies, falling into step with our companion, grateful for the view which releases us of the necessity of eye contact, we might well take a deep breath and start to speak of what is really going on for us. And when we do so, in the English language, chances are we’ll use metaphor.
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