Walking the Southwest Coastal Path

Day 34
Buckland to Salcombe 12.5 miles

Doing ones’s thinking.
That is what the morning hours allowed this day. We were off early and the walk was pretty spectacular on multiple levels; the morning light, the cool air and gentle breezes, along with the sights, sounds, and smell of the sea all touching one’s sense of life while bathing one internally in a calmness that matched and resonated with the beauty, and vastness, of the external environment we were moving through. One of those days.

Such a leisure that allows one to hear the thoughts entering, and out of the still point backtrack or follow their course into the dawns light. For Thoreau, the dawning hour was synonymous with his “awakening” hours, when he was most awake inwardly, and thus most alive! A rare gift which can come from a walk when one possesses the requisite capital of leisure, freedom, and independence.

This following, or tracking, of thought is what Native Americans infer when they speak about ‘doing one’s thinking’, and is something which they feel is vital to learning; if all true education is self education. It was one of those days, like today, where the discipline can get deeply rooted if we attend to it.

Days that youth need dearly too, for I often question, and ask, when they are allowed to hear, let alone think, their own thoughts. Little time is given to go deeply into such needed discipline within the harried nature of institutional learning, and echoes of Gatto’s claim of ‘dumbing them down’ are not far off the mark if they truly can’t hear the call. The mythical call to adventure.