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together in his nature writing. His book Arctic Dreams, about his travels to the Arctic, left a lasting impact on me since I first read it. It's a book that moves at the tempo of a walk — he mentions "walking" 119 times — as he travels above the article circle to experience the rich connections between people and the natural world there. This book can be seen as an expert guide on how the ritual of walking can open our multiple senses to the living landscape, strengthening the connection between the four layers mentioned above. "Out there are whales — I have seen six or eight gray whales as I walked this evening. And the ice, pale as the dove-colored sky. The wind raises the surface of the water. Wake of a seal in the shore lead, gone now. I bowed. I bowed to what knows no deliberating legislature or parliament, no religion, no competing theories of economics, an expression of allegiance with the mystery of life." — Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams 2) Walking as art Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the American naturalist/philosopher, published a wide-ranging essay on Walking in the May 1862 issue of the Atlantic. The essay is a fascinating window into Thoreau's wilderness-immersed mind, but he begins the essay with the idea that walking is art. "I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean." For Thoreau, the art of walking isn't about reaching some hoped-for destination. To think of walking as an art, Thoreau suggests, is to imagine each walk, even a short stroll around the block with your dog, as a grand journey of the highest purpose, "Walking as art calls attention to the simplest aspects of the act: the way rural walking measures the body and the earth against each other, the way urban walking elicits unpredictable social encounters." – Rebecca Solnit