Walking is My Meditation and Artistic Practice
Learning to accept my particular ways of communing with myself and the world around me
Music is a huge part of my life as an artist and writer.
So is walking. I combined the two at an early age. First, when I lived with my grandparents as a young child, I walked. Their house was a small, light brown rambler on a small grassy plot of land in Kirkland, Washington. I drove by it a couple years ago; it’s still there and now worth a lot of money despite its ramshackle appearance.
Living with my grandparents wasn’t easy, but it was easier than living with my mother, for whom I was too much. Though I missed her and, back then, would have chosen to go live with her above anything else. Now I think that living with my grandma and grandpa saved me. Their love was unconditional.
My grandmother was a recovered addict and alcoholic; a night nurse who slept most days. Her sleeping meant I couldn’t bring friends home, nor could I make noise myself. Even today I’m absurdly sensitive to noise in my apartment— a sensitivity that’s made it impossible for me to live with roommates. Back then I was often overwhelmed by the silence of the small house. My grandpa coped by setting up an office in the garage, where he typed away on his typewriter, a secret writer.
I coped by walking. I’d either stop home after school, after walking home, and grab a snack of applesauce or string cheese, or skip coming home altogether and keep walking. I memorized all the streets I walked. To the left of their front door was the hill that led to the wild paths winding through forest that’s long since been developed. To the right was the main street, leading to a busier intersection that led to I-90, which led to Seattle or the east coast, though I had no concept of the east coast then. Across the street were two horses. I often grabbed a couple apples from our backyard apple trees and fed them, hand flat, so they’d let me stroke their soft necks.
There was the fenced house with the two frightening dogs who were either tied up or not, creating a Russian roulette situation whenever I passed it. One of the dogs jumped the fence once, and stalked me all the way back home.
There was the house belonging to the older woman with bright red hair who ran a terrible daycare consisting mostly of screaming and television, which I attended for a while, until I wrote her a letter telling her that she must be very sad to be so mean to children. I wasn’t allowed back after that.
There was the giant willow tree in front of the house once inhabited by a close friend, whose family was as transient as my mother.
All of these things, which I passed every day on my walks, accrued meaning and grounded me in a sense of belonging that I didn’t necessarily feel in other parts of my life.
If my mother couldn’t love me, surely the spirit of the willow tree could, and did?
I lived with my grandparents for two years, presumably to give my mother a break. I never quite understood why. When I asked I never received an honest explanation, as far as I could tell. But this is where I began to walk as a coping mechanism, a habit that has likely kept me alive.
It was after I moved back in with my mother, at Totem Creek Apartments, that I got my first tape player walkman and several tapes: MC Hammer, Paula Abdul, Greatest Hits of the 70s. I had always been obsessed with music, but this was new. I often recorded radio broadcasts on tapes so I could replay and rewind to repeat certain songs, but now I had tapes of my own.
By the time I was thirteen, and my mom had remarried, choosing an abusive alcoholic who could pay off all her accrued debts, I’d upgraded to a CD player. I preferred rap and R&B (Dr. Dre, Tupac, Snoop Dog and Ghetto Boys and EPMD and Jodeci) but also loved Alice in Chains and PJ Harvey. I went for hours-long walks, taking the main roads, where I could see people’s eyes through their windshields. I wanted people to notice me on my walks. I wanted to see how they noticed me. The noticing became part of my walking, and was for a long time. I could write a whole thing about that noticing, and how I learned to perceive myself and my experiences through the eyes of others, but that would be a digression.
My phone is filled with pictures from my walks, which means my phone is filled with pictures of all the places I’ve ever existed— New York City, Prague, Dordogne, Umbria, Syracuse, Denver, Pokhara and Kathmandu, Hanoi, the Bay Area. I never saw this as anything special, my drive to walk and explore.
It wasn’t until the end of March, when I could no longer walk, that I understood how integral walking is to my well being. It’s how I commune with the world and myself. Walking is meditation, exercise, and observation. It grounds me, quite literally, but also emotionally and spiritually. It is a way of deepening my connection with everything.
Walking as my Practice of Presence
A few afternoons ago I found myself feel bereft and sad. Maybe because I’d been on pain pills for a month and a half and have been tapering off of them. Maybe because I just went through hell, and my body is metabolizing what it felt like to be suddenly disabled, to awaken to my own aloneness in the world so brutally, taking myself to the hospital, crying to myself, and confessing my feelings only to my therapist in the absence of close friends and family.
(I don’t blame this absence of support on friends. I blame it on our culture, with loads us up with so much work and stress that we are unable to truly care for others when they need it.)
I tweeted about my sadness, and my crying, and said I would go for a crying walk. I put on my headphones and listened to a playlist I created for Walking.
I often match my own mood to playlists. When I need something contemplative and comforting I can choose from a variety of playlists I’ve created for myself.
On this walk I turned left from my house and went all the way south until I got to Gasworks Park, which used to supply the city with gas until 1956, and was quickly turned into a park after it shut down. Now the park consists of all the old machinery, most of it fenced off, and Kite Hill, which is a hill where people (you guessed it) fly kites. The park is green and grassy and juts out into South Lake Union (Elissa Washuta wrote about South Lake Union in her amazing book White Magic).
As I walked into the park, which was filled with clusters of people and couples, a sense of peace draped itself around me. I felt myself slip into the perspective of what I call the witness. This is the same part of myself I can access through meditation, and it dawned on me, for the first time, that walking was my way of meditating, and I could finally stop chastising myself for not meditating enough.
What is the witness? It’s that enduring part of myself that watches and observes and is beyond me. It doesn’t judge. It is at peace, always. It absorbs and takes in and metabolizes and releases.
I walked up Kite Hill, passing the groups of people sitting on the grass. I didn’t feel alone, or lonely. It occurred to me that the people surrounding me were as much a part of me as I was part of myself, yet they did not know me, and when they looked at me they couldn’t see me, only their idea of who and what I was. And me, them.
The sky was bright blue, littered with both expansive, cotton ball clouds and thin tissue paper clouds, and a small strip of a rainbow hung above a bridge, almost invisible. Tiny daisies opened their white blossoms to the sun. I walked back down the hill and to the edge of the lake, whose water gently reflected the sky and the city. A plane flew overhead and I thought, how stupid we are. We invented airplanes, yet it’s all a mess.
It’s in these moments that I understand the largesse of history, the universe, and how small I am. How little I have to do with anything, yet how integral I am to everything, as everything holds everything together.
It’s this sense of smallness, of disintegration, that I also find in meditation. A sense of my atoms separating themselves out into the world so I can see my connection to everything, and how meaningless my ego is, which thinks I am separate from it all.
This is why I walk.