FINDING YOUR RIGHT PLACE

I am properly prepared. I am off walking – not too far, but the point is not distance but enjoyment. I have a need to liberate myself from the “assumption of everyday life”. I have a drive to escape from being a voter, tax-payer or any other of the roles I am forced into. I will cease to be identified by my salary – or my golf handicap (neither of which I have, but people make assumptions, and usually the wrong ones).

I have a desire for Nature to be my teacher and I aim to learn of my special quest in life, to go in humility and simplicity. My aim is not to earn a living but to earn happiness. Thus, my main motive is curiosity – what’s around the next bend, and to explore the mystery of names on a map, until I get to the point where the great door that doesn’t look like a door, opens, and I UNDERSTAND.

In 1986, a botanist named Oliver Rackham wrote “there are four ways in which landscape is lost – the loss of beauty, the loss of freedom, the loss of wildlife and vegetation, and the loss of meaning”. It is the last of these that is the most difficult to measure…

The “emblem” of my walk is a river. It’s not an Amazon or Nile or Indus, but it’s MY river and I want to know it well, in all its moods. I want to know how it sounds, its moods and how it looks after the nature alongside it. Like the Aborigines of Australia, I shall walk my own songline.

So, two to three weeks in autumnal sunshine and I shall be as a new man; relaxed, happier and certainly much more knowledgeable. 

Until I return,

Peripatetic Scribe