{"quotes":[{"text":"You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.","author":"Frédéric Gros","tags":["adventure","art","awe","beauty","discovery","earth","explore","freedom","fresh-air","get-outside","hikes","hiking","joy","movement","nature","our-planet","outdoors","outdoors-church","outside","peace","philosophy","pilgrim","pilgrimage","poetry","serenity","visual-poetry","walking","walks","wonder"],"id":1460,"author_id":"Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Gros"},{"text":"This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.","author":"Frédéric Gros","tags":["adventure","art","awe","beauty","discovery","earth","explore","freedom","fresh-air","get-outside","hikes","hiking","joy","movement","nature","our-planet","outdoors","outdoors-church","outside","peace","philosophy","pilgrim","pilgrimage","poetry","serenity","visual-poetry","walking","walks","wonder"],"id":28968,"author_id":"Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Gros"},{"text":"Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.","author":"Bruce Chatwin","tags":["childhood","exploring","intelligence","walks"],"id":38569,"author_id":"Bruce+Chatwin"},{"text":"None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.","author":"Frédéric Gros","tags":["adventure","art","awe","beauty","discovery","earth","explore","freedom","fresh-air","get-outside","hikes","hiking","joy","movement","nature","our-planet","outdoors","outdoors-church","outside","peace","philosophy","pilgrim","pilgrimage","poetry","serenity","visual-poetry","walking","walks","wander","wanderer","wonder"],"id":50407,"author_id":"Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Gros"},{"text":"Thoreau: ‘The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.’ That is why walking leads to a total loss of interest in what is called – laughably no doubt – the ‘news’, one of whose main features is that it becomes old as soon as it is uttered. Once caught in the rhythm, Thoreau says, you are on the treadmill: you want to know what comes next. The real challenge, though, is not to know what has changed, but to get closer to what remains eternally new. So you should replace reading the morning papers with a walk. News items replace one another, become mixed up together, are repeated and forgotten. But the truth is that as soon as you start walking, all that noise, all those rumours, fade out. What’s new? Nothing: the calm eternity of things, endlessly renewed.","author":"Frédéric Gros","tags":["adventure","art","awe","beauty","discovery","earth","explore","freedom","fresh-air","get-outside","hikes","hiking","joy","movement","nature","our-planet","outdoors","outdoors-church","outside","peace","philosophy","pilgrim","pilgrimage","poetry","serenity","visual-poetry","walking","walks","wander","wanderer","wonder"],"id":64563,"author_id":"Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Gros"},{"text":"I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze. There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me. It's the beautiful thing about youth.There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.","author":"Blake Crouch","tags":["autumn","fall","memory","night","smell","walks","youth"],"id":74849,"author_id":"Blake+Crouch"},{"text":"A joyful life,reaching out to people from all walks of life.","author":"Lailah Gifty Akita","tags":["encourage-literature-and-culture","encouragement-and-attitude","encouragement","encouragment","inspirational","inspired","inspired","inspired-soul","joy","joy-of-life","joyful","joyful-living","joyful-living-living","joyful-living","joyful-living","joyful","joyful","joyful-thankful","joyfulness","life-philosophy","life","people","people-person","people","people-relations","walk","walks","walks-of-life","wonder","wonderful-dream","wonderful-heat","wonderful-life","wonderful-soul","wonderful-things"],"id":84260,"author_id":"Lailah+Gifty+Akita"},{"text":"Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.","author":"Will Self","tags":["christmas-parties","corporation","embarrassment","embarrassmentsion","masturbation","walks","wine","writers","writing"],"id":137507,"author_id":"Will+Self"},{"text":"The boring thing with taking a walk with someone is that your thoughts are then dictated by the subject or subjects of your conversation and that is made worse by the fact that most sane people are terrified of silence whenever they are with or near someone. ","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["bore","boredom","boring","conversation","converse","dictate","fear","meditate","meditation","phobia","ramble","ramblers","relax","relaxation","silence","talk","talking","unwind","walk","walker","walking","walks"],"id":145235,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints….","author":"Frédéric Gros","tags":["adventure","art","awe","beauty","discovery","earth","explore","freedom","fresh-air","get-outside","hikes","hiking","joy","movement","nature","our-planet","outdoors","outdoors-church","outside","peace","philosophy","pilgrim","pilgrimage","poetry","serenity","visual-poetry","walking","walks","wonder"],"id":146092,"author_id":"Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Gros"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":32,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}