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that should be approached like a deep meditation or a momentous celebration. As Thoreau says, in his usual dramatic way: "Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms." 3) Walking as autobiography Renato Rosaldo, an anthropologist who carried out research with the Ilongot people in northern Luzon, in the Philippines, describes how the Ilongot often talk of their personal history through the metaphor of walking: "In describing their past lives Ilongots speak of walking on paths that meander, like the courses of the streams they follow, in ways that cannot be foreseen" Rebecca Solnit writes on this idea too: how throughout history people have imagined their personal history like a journey on foot. But also how a journey on foot triggers the imagination to think about one's life backward and forward: "If life itself, the passage of time allotted to us, is described as a journey, it's most often imagined as a journey on foot, a pilgrim's progress across the landscape of personal history. And often, when we imagine ourselves, we imagine ourselves walking; "when she walked the earth" is one way to describe someone's existence, her profession is her "walk of life"… …Labyrinths, pilgrimages, mountain climbs, hikes with clear and desirable destinations, all allow us to take our allotted time as a literal journey with spiritual dimensions we can understand through the senses." 4) Walking for thinking (and writing) There's something about walking through the world that triggers our brain to walk through ideas too. Like hitting upon a new idea in the shower, heading outside shifts our habits of thinking and jostles us into meandering pathways that can sometimes lead to new ideas. This is great news for writers stuck in a rut. To quote again from Rebecca Solnit's fascinating book, Wanderlust, she writes, "The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it." Mary Oliver sat down with Krista Tippett in 2015, for a rare interview on the radio program On Being. Oliver begins by describing the challenges her childhood, and how her daily ritual of writing while walking in the woods transformed her life, inspiring her to pursue a career as a writer and poet. For Oliver, she realized