Robin Kearns shares insights into learning to appreciate the sacred all around us.

Back during the first Lockdown, I was on Waiheke Island. There, with all but essential vehicles off the roads, pedestrians turned back the clock. We walked the way people did before the hegemony of cars. When out walking or cycling, we offered greetings in a way usually reserved for those we already know. There was distancing but it was sociable distancing. But we noticed the odour of exhaust emissions more acutely than usual.

It was a time of noticing the non-human life with which we share the planet. We heard more birdsong. With roads quiet and the engines of industry silenced, the air and the sea seemed to have a new clarity. At the beach the horizon seemed sharper and we saw fish in the shallows. Dolphins came to visit.

Second Lockdown

More recently, I spent the year’s second Lockdown in mainland Auckland without a car. It’s been a great opportunity to re-appreciate the neighbourhood and find new walking routes I never knew existed. But places soon feel closer than they did before as routes and landmarks become familiar. It’s also struck me that it takes a certain humility to walk and carry home your groceries in a backpack.

What does it mean to walk humbly in these viral times? It seems to me that in a car-dominated society, walking itself can be an act of humility; we step out in our embodied selves while, just beyond the footpath and grass verge, the powerful machines that rule our cities speed past.

Walking necessarily humbles us through its reminders of our limitations as well as capacities. Our bodies speak of ageing joints or offer painful echoes of past injuries. But to persist can be to walk humbly: in gratitude for the mobility we have and in active defiance of the urge to drive or be passively driven.

Taking Note of Where We Are

But what does humbly mean? To walk humbly is surely to be attentive to the “whereness” of our walking. It is a time to both lose our thoughts and find our place. A time to ponder questions such as: What lies beneath our feet? Who walked this route before us: today, yesterday or generations ago? It is a time in which to give thanks for the ground beneath our feet.

Being Humble

If we break open the words, there is a connection between walking humbly and Earth itself. Humus is the organic matter that becomes soil. In turn it offers fertility and supports life itself. The Latin word humilis grew from humus with its meaning of something lowly and unpretentious. This word and its meaning became humble in Old English.

In a world that over-values confidence and self-importance, we can do well to reclaim these connections. Making these links allows us to see walking humbly as being open to each journey rather than focused totally on the destination. These links between humility and what lies beneath our feet can keep us close to the ground. Slowly we can re-find an intimacy with Earth. Eventually we can gently and more deeply rediscover the ground of our being.

Walking Tactically

The ideas of the French Jesuit and social theorist Michel de Certeau can be helpful. In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, he writes of two types of walking: the strategic and the tactical. Footpaths and combined walk/cycleways offer strategies: they prompt people to keep left and keep moving. They have been designed by planners and are focused on destinations, being logically constructed to ensure people get efficiently and safely from point A to point B. Tactics are more subtle. For de Certeau, these are ways of walking that involve shortcuts, pauses, and personalised routes influenced by memories. Tactics are ways we can resist routes that can be tediously rational and instead bring creativity to our way-finding.

Based in Mt Albert during the second Lockdown, my regular walking has followed Te Auaunga/Oakley Creek. This route encourages being tactical: stepping off the path to observe the water’s flow, a pool’s reflection or some small plant. Through the tactic of lingering, we can humbly expose ourselves to the unexpected.

It is a corridor of imperfect beauty. The path is broken but the land is being healed. Here, for almost two decades, volunteers have weeded, planted and cared for this place. Gradually its mana is being restored. I, too, have planted and plucked rubbish from the riverbank. Other times I walked, informed by the smells noticed by our beloved dog. These memories walk with me.

Walking humbly hones the discipline of attentiveness. When walking the same route daily we can see with new eyes: an opening flower, the pattern of bark on a tree, the quirky design of someone’s letter box. Walking beside the Creek has become part of my practice as well as my place. I know each bend. I am not alone. My friend Kennedy Warne tells me he cannot stay away: the Creek has become his Walden Pond. In its presence, the stream speaks to those who listen.

Practice of Humility

Back on the city’s footpaths, I have maintained a Lockdown practice of humility: greeting people when passing. Saying “Hello” is a simple gesture that adds a social dimension to distancing. How each hello is received is not the point: some are welcomed and reciprocated; some are met with surprise; others ignored. Such is city life. To “walk humbly with our God” is to walk not just in the presence of the Divine but to bring Presence to the path we tread. To be humble is to be vulnerable and open to being ignored.

In these COVID times, travel offshore is but dreams and memories. Perhaps Earth is asking something new of us: to walk locally and humbly. This is a time when we can be grounded – not in frustration but in celebration of the here and now. It can be a time to save the immense cost in terms of dollars and carbon emissions it would otherwise take to reach international destinations. The Camino can be closer than we think.

This can be a time to reacquaint ourselves with the paths that lead to a deeper understanding of this land. Do we have the humility to learn who walked our land in pre-colonial times? To learn of dispossession and despair as land and lives were lost? Can we embrace this humility? Can we walk our way into knowing more deeply the place on which we stand?

Walking Attentively

Whether we walk locally or take on Great Walks, it’s the walking attentively that counts. We can walk humbly to the letter box and back or set out on a week-long trek. Distance doesn’t matter. Duration doesn’t reduce our capacity to find the sacred in the act of walking.

To walk humbly is to move in gratitude with and towards our God. To walk is to find thankfulness for bodily capacity, for time, for the weather, for living where it is safe to stroll, and for all that comes to our attention along the way. The Church may say we are in “ordinary time”. But there is no ordinary time when walking. To walk humbly with our God is to welcome the extraordinary into our days.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 253 October 2020: 8-9