Walk This World

Walking has always been important to me.

I remember my parents going to see a friend of theirs.  The man was troubled and came back from a horse ride sweaty and hot, his horse lathered.  My mother told me that he had been out praying on his horse ride.  This was unusual to us, because we were taught to pray in the LDS fashion - in your room, with the doors closed, on your knees, etc.

Most of my praying has always been done while walking...

I have gone on long walks for as long as I could remember.  As a teen, my night walks were my witching hour.  I would get off of work at 10PM, go home, microwave my dinner, and then I would go for a walk.  I would stuff my pockets with cassettes, spare batteries, and I would walk off into the night with my Walkman in hand and headphones on my ears.  Back  then, my musical tastes included Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and Dead Can Dance.  This music was the perfect soundtrack to the night  - a sweet bar of transcendent light making a continuous stream between by ears.  This was the time to moan lost loves and work through teenage angst.

I had a preset route - across the street and through the campus of my high school, past the football field, alongside the public pool, and into the sleeping neighborhoods.  In the hedges, the black widows would come out at night and glisten in the streetlamps.  I would make a big loop and be home by 3AM and collapse in bed.

I was in love with night.  I was in love with walking.  I remember sitting on the hood of a car outside the Domes in Casa Grande on the night of a full moon.  I just wanted to walk the earth, walk east, and not stop until I could walk no more.  I told this story to a high school guidance counselor, that I did not care about college, or jobs, that I just wanted to walk and see where my feet took me.  She told me that I reminded her of another student.  At the time I was mortified, because I couldn't stand the student she compared me to.

When I moved to South Salt Lake to go to college, I had to find new routes.  The nights were colder, and so I bought headphones that acted as ear muffs as well.  My polygamist aunt was worried about me walking so late in those neighborhoods.  I was baffled by that.  Salt Lake looked like Mayberry, much different from the dusty barrios I had grown up around in Arizona.

Before my marriage, I was walking around four miles a day.  After I got married, I stopped walking.  As a newlywed, I had much more interesting things to do with my spare time than walk.  As a result, I started to get a little extra padding around the midsection.

Years later, when I moved to my ranch in Arizona, I started to take up walking again.  There were countless miles of dirt roads to explore.  My walks - as usual - were a time to explore new music.  But this time was also invaluable to me as a writer.  If I am facing writer's block, the best thing I can do is walk.  The knees pump that blood up to my brain, and the ideas start billowing.

As I mentioned, walking is also my time to pray.  This was vital to me as a husband and father to a plural family where the burdens and responsibilities felt overwhelming at times.  This was my time to pour my soul out to my God and ask for guidance.

So you can imagine how difficult it has been these last couple of years - with the blood clots and foot ulcers - being unable to walk, being unable to have a means to sort through my thoughts.  It has been a challenge not to be able to just go out and walk whenever I want to.

When you are bedridden and all you can see is the sunlight coming through the window, there is no ache that is more poignant than wanting to go out into the fresh air and walk.  I still to this day wait for the day when I can walk again, when I can walk this world.

I will continue in my next post about how 2013 has treated me.