Mary Eynon

Interdisciplinary Artist and Maker

What walking means to me

What walking means to me

Walking is something I have nearly always done, well as long as I can remember. Growing up as a child I didn’t have lots of technology, and I am still learning how to use it now. Instead I was outside, exploring with my hands, getting muddy and collecting bugs. I guess this is where my love for the landscape started. However, at a young my mum passed away and my dad remarried bringing two families together. At the age of 7 this turned my world upside town, everything is knew had been changed and altered and I had to learn to be part of a new family, in a new house with more siblings. This new world was rather confusing at times and I think we will always be learning to adapt to one another. It was at this point my life my family got us a dog, Honey. She became my best friends, as a young child finding it difficult to get my head around lots of things and to talk to people, Honey was the one I confided in. Together we walked from when she had had her jabs. She was stubborn at first, stopping after only a few meters! But each day we got further and further in the mornings before school. Even my neighbors noticed and found my continuous efforts hilarious. “I see you every morning, and when she has had enough, she sits down and you come back”. When she was happy to walk around the block, we ventured into the park. Together we explored and took new steps. 

  

“The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. “It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable, experience to be lost in the woods at any time” he wrote in Walden. “Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations”

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost

 

For me, this quote answers so many questions and makes sense of my 

thoughts from a young age. I can read it over and over again and relate in every way. So finally I can make sense of my walking, not that it ever stopped me.

145 thoughts on “What walking means to me”

  24. Thank you for your sharing. I am worried that I lack creative ideas. It is your article that makes me full of hope. Thank you. But, I have a question, can you help me?

  86. Thank you for your sharing. I am worried that I lack creative ideas. It is your article that makes me full of hope. Thank you. But, I have a question, can you help me?

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