The Three Practices: Walking

[haptalaon]

"It's a dangerous business, stepping out of your front door"

The best thing I ever did for my practice was going for a weekly walk in the local woods. Paganism, as taught in books, can so easily become book-bound: we learn the magical uses of the rowan, without being able to identify one. The weekly walk was time: aimless time, boundless time, experiential time. I cannot say, exactly, what I learnt there; but that too was a lesson. For it is easy to import our achievement-focused, progress-seeking mindset into Paganism - am I advancing? Am I succeeding? Am I acquiring? Rather than another way of experiencing the world: am I being, am I existing?

So the first of the Three Practices is: go for a damn walk.



Spend a little time outside every day. Go for a walk once a week. Every few months, make plans to go on a longer adventure somewhere.

The walk can be a way of building up a relationship with a particular place:

• Go at different times of day
• Focus on the birds, then on the beasts, then the trees, then the plants, and learn to identify them
• Go at different times of year
• Bring a plastic bag and litterpick
• Bring a camera or art materials to make images or poems
• Bring a notebook for reflections, or to record what you see
• Learn about the history, and see what marks you can find there
• Go in different weathers

A walk can be to a natural place, or an urban one. A walk can be to different places every time. It can be mapped or unmapped. It could use a set of challenges, like these 30 Microadventures. It could be centered around a deity or concept: for example, instead of a weekly walk, you could do a weekly sunset watch, or stargaze. It could include devotional words.

Try not to let the walk become too goal-oriented. Taking photographs can help you focus and experience; uploading them online does not. Setting a goal, or keeping a map with pins, can help motivate action: but don't let yourself become distracted by it. And don't worry if you don't slip into the otherworld straight away, or ever, because one can get distracted by Pagan goals too. If you've walked, then you've walked.

Accessibility

An important facet of the walk is that it is aimless. I find formal ritual extremely difficult to find the executive function for. So the rite of Walking was devised as an extremely simple way to reverence and experience the divine: no candles, no robes, no words, because the effort of getting out and about is enough to exhaust me. Like other Solar practices, Walking has a minimal barrier to entry: it's not skilled or complex, it's more about mindfulness and drawing your mind to experience the world and the senses more fully. Pre-planning, knowing when you will have energy, being able to get a clear working space, being able to shower or bathe or prepare particular foods or tools: Solar practices reject these standard Pagan requirements.

It's important to state here that being able to walk is not an essential part of Walking. An hour spent sat in nature, or even beside the window, are acceptable Walking practices. The essential thing is to experience nature directly, and to experience it for its own sake - without clear structure or goal.

Ways of Walking

We associate the Walk with the Solar:

• The Sun is external-facing - the Walk calls us to go outside
• The Sun is experiential - the Walk encourages to take chances and opportunities, stepping out of our daily rut
• The Sun is of the land and the landscape - the Walk takes us into the natural world and to historic locations
• The Sun is physical - the Walk helps you be within the body and the senses

For this reason, you can replace literal walking with other Solar-type practices such as:

• Time spent with your family or community
• Time spent baking, or working on a communal project
  
• Time spent on a physical activity - a sport, dancing, singing, or a craft technique
• Saying "yes" to life.

We can understand Walking as a kind of formal mindfulness - entering into the flow of life and being present in your body. Sitting in the sun with a cup of tea is an excellent low-impact Walk.

Deconstruction

Accessibility: "Spend 20 minutes meditating every day" is the first practice of too many traditions; the point at which I fail and drop out. Your daily practice should be achieveable, so it has time for the benefits to take effect. It should also be flexible: note that the Walk doesn't have a prescribed distance or time, or even regularity. We empower the practitioner to find a way to meet the goals in a way that works around their energy and life, rather than prescribing a set goal.

Skill building: It's good to do some sort of regular practice, but that practice should directly relate to the hoped-for outcome of the pathway. In our case, the "goal" of the path is to seek the Landweird and to encounter it. Walking gives you a lot of empty time in the outdoors, building up an image bank, letting the mind wander, and providing that opportunity. In occultism, where will or control is essential to the end goal, meditation makes more sense: but emptying the mind is a cold, minimalist process, white lights and empty pure spheres. Whereas Fencraft is a gleeful rummage through England's clutter. So wandering feet, wandering minds, and an accumulation of image and experience is essential.

Make Sacred: you should spend a lot of time doing things you enjoy (easier said than done when you're depressed). You should revere that which is worthy of reverence. Spending more time in nature is a natural fit for Pagan-ish paths, and yet Pagan handbooks spend an awful lot of time talking about correspondences, history, ritual form, and so forth. Probably because "Go for a damn walk" is not enough to fill a book.

A doing and a being religion: Fencraft talks about Solar practices and Lunar practices, to encourage both doing, being, and also reading. Reading is important, but it's easy to get stuck on it. So we describe from the outset - be Solar, go walking, be Lunar, read books, do both in a balanced way.

Setting intention and focus: Life is short, and we are what we do. The Walk is a kind of repeated commitment, a repeated affirmation, that in the pie graph of your life you hope to prioritise time spent in nature, and time spent being rather than accomplishing.

Seeking the mystery: The goal of the walk is not the walk, but the creation of space. We learn why we walk while walking. Religions are boring and dead when they are a correspondence list on paper. Mystery practices are questions without answers. We might discover a value or metaphor through walking, or see a particularly beautiful wood pigeon, or meet a spirit, or find a new thing you wish to learn about. It might help you untangle a difficult week. I can't predefine or guess what the Mystery you encounter will be. In other words, the Walk is a gap for the seeker to find their own religion, deities, and so forth, within which there is no right answer. That's more powerful, egalitarian, and direct than religious roads where it is handed down or predefined.

A sensory bank: building up experiences in the natural world can then be drawn into ritual. Evoking elemental air becomes easier when you can evoke an actual storm you've seen.

Mooting
Fencraft is a solitary-first faith. However, if you practice as a part of a moot, ensure you mix up solitary and communal Walks. Walking lends itself easily to feasting together, hiking together, and sharing maps. But part of the purpose of Walking is letting your mind wander.

In Fencraft
We are called to seek the Landweird, so the Three Practices make space in which to engage directly with our landscape - be it the natural world, the traces of the past, the ghosts and beasts and barrows. As my partner says: "Who is this God who claims lordship over the land, and yet prefers to be worshipped inside?". By and large, our Powers are outside, and so we should seek them there.

It supports our principle of Official Uncertainty: we don't know what you'll find out there, but the Landweird reveals itself to each of us in divers ways, and so your walk is your walk. A lifetime of walking is a form of collage, a web of memory in which your time and the lands time is intertwined - your imperfect memory of the land, the land's imperfect memory of you.

Reading List
You shouldn't be reading: you should be off on a damn walk.

But a small collection of maps, guidebooks, botanical and bird books or star-almanacs, and practical guides to woodcraft or traditional skills are good choices for your Walking library.