So let’s start with Rumi, who has written perhaps the perfect EverWalk poem for these times:

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.

Don’t try to see through the distances.

That’s not for human beings.

Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.

Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.

Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke captures how even the simplest and most familiar walks can transform us in mysterious ways:

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.

going far beyond the road I have begun,

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has an inner light, even from a distance-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which, hardly sensing it,

we already are; a gesture waves us on

answering our own wave…

but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Poet and philosopher David Whyte leads walking tours all over the world. This poem about Ireland pretty much says everything about what we feel when we walk in extraordinary places in Nature.

Mameen

Oregon poet William Stafford wrote a poem every single day. This poem exquisitely captures the unexpected joy that can come from an unexpected walk.

Once in the 40’s

We were alone one night on a long

road in Montana. This was in winter, a big

night, far to the stars. We had hitched,

my wife and I, and left our ride at

a crossing to go on. Tired and cold — but

brave — we trudges along. This, we said,

was our life, watched over, allowed to go

where we wanted.

We said we’d come back some time

when we got rich. We’d leave the others and find

a night like this, whatever we had to give,

and no matter how far, to be so happy again.

Robert Frost has written some truly beautiful poems about walking, such as Acquainted with the Night. But the one we all remember is this one. And its words speak true to all of us at this momentous time in history:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

And finally we come to Mary Oliver, who spent every day walking through Nature — and gifted us with her beautiful poems about what she saw. She reminds us that perhaps the truest reason for any of us to walk through the natural world is to remember to stop believing that what we humans say is what we need to hearing. And so we leave you with this poem by Mary Oliver:

What the Trees Say

At breakfast, the heart of the egg looks like pure
gold.  Sunlight lifts the morning like a lever, 
and even before I step outside, I see a river
of sparrows rise and scatter through the dawn.

That’s when I tell myself, Look here,
you don’t have to hurry.  Don’t have to arrive
anywhere on time.  Don’t have to decide how far
to walk across the lawn or whether to carry on
into the woods.  I pull on my jacket.  Breezes scatter
the yellow leaves.  The trees are whispering,

It’s fall.  Got to strip down.  Got to let the sky in here,
make a place for birds.  Got to reach further
down in the earth.  Got to hunker, children,
got to hold still enough to feel the wings flutter.