Musing on the relationship between walking and seeing

“If I need to bring clarity to my thinking and feelings, I walk, better still, walk by water and if I need to be convinced of my immortality, I walk on the water.”

“If I want to be ‘between the tick and the tock’ – I walk.”

The ‘act’ of walking

“If you can walk, you can dance. Within this traditional African proverb lies a hidden truth about our nature as animals: our bodies are built to have an inherent, subconscious sense of rhythm.

From an early age, we unknowingly develop a rhythm in the way we move, from crawling across the floor to walking on two feet.

As we mature, this repetitious pattern of muscle movements become automatic as we travel from one place to another, we don’t pay much attention to the rhythmic nature of walking at all.”

Landscapes are image galleries

My walk into, through and out of a landscape, is akin to my viewing images in a real or virtual gallery - stopping - browsing – engaging with and studying the images.

Memory and landscapes

My memories are created and re-discovered through connection with familiar and new landscapes.

These experiences are captured through narratives that communicate stories relating that locales past present and future

All landscapes contain a wealth of untold stories about its geography, buildings and people that have inhabited them

Landscapes and socialising

My relationship with landscapes I live in and pass through is a fundamental human need. The more we [you, me and us] are engaged with, and knowledgeable about, our physical environments the richer our life is!

Humans often share their landscape observations as a means of engaging a stranger in conversation.

Seeing the landscape

My photographic background has helped focus my vista viewpoints when I’m mobile and stationary.

Images, both analogue and digital, are framed to focus the photographer’s attention.

The current version of the frame is the tablet / phone screen, and this methodology can be used to enhance my engagement between me [the walker] and the landscape’s images.

Seeing ‘infinity’

Landscapes that trigger my ability ‘to see infinity’ consist of, roughly, 50% landscape, usually fairly level vistas, and 50% skyscape.

A distant horizon, a conjoined skyscape, plus markers in or on the landscape / skyscape enhance my ability to see this imagined infinity.

Seeing the ‘unseen’

Walking through any landscape, My ‘social historian’ self reads the landscape through an anthropological filter. Is there a connection between who I am and the landscapes I’ve experienced?

Oh, yes! Ask Poles about their disruptive history and the forests that shaped the Polish sense of self.