Sometimes I come across a book that makes me want to stop often in my reading.

Because I want to go back over the sentence or the paragraph that I just read, and re-read it.

Not because it is complex, or I didn’t get it. 

But because it was so beautiful, or the thought so identifiable and simple that I am amazed to see it expressed in words.

Because, the idea gives me pause to take comfort in it, and see the movie of the feeling of the idea play out in my mind.

I am reading such a book right now. And because of all this stopping… it’s going slowly.

The book is called Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews. It is a collection of essays of ten women with documentations and publications about their love and adventures of walking. Most of these are set in the United Kingdom.

The women who are documented have diary entries talking about the paths they covered, and their incessant need to keep walking. 

The author of the book who’s brought their walking lives to this collection has made their journeys read like the pilgrimage these women are making in a men’s world of walking towards self-recognition, in service of their solitude, or their creative souls. Her language brings the sanctity of these journeys front and center, if only for themselves.

Which means I, as a reader, have to stop often to re-read passages. And then, stop again, to copy them in my little journal because I want to keep those words, those ideas, those feelings close to me long after the pages of this book are flipped and put away.

Reading of such a book makes me feel alive. It makes me want to follow these women in their tradition of walking, to maybe feel as alive as they do, to experience their connectedness to nature and to themselves for my self.

I love walking. If it’s not too cold and icy, I can go on for a long time. And being in the middle of this collection of essays, I am feeling the itch to go on a long walking holiday. One day, I would like to participate in this most simple, and most profound of traditions that these women have set before me through this book, to go for one long walk through the land.

Until then, I will just walk wherever and whenever the opportunity arises.