![]() ![]() For this is the secret of successful sauntering. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. 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. ![]() 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. In a short sermon, Walking, this great meanderer of space and time takes equal pleasure in noticing as a movement. When Henry David Thoreau (J– May 6, 1862) kicked up his heels, he exemplified the importance of "what is discovered along the way," whether it was filling his pockets with ripe fruit and curious fungi or slipping into a more meditative state of being. ![]() "I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field," wrote Mary Oliver in her last collection of essays.Ī venture forth in the dignity of body and the freedom of spirit is more than movement it is an entrance to something, an abandonment of something else. ![]()
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