Take Walks in Nature

I’m a great believer in the positive power of nature. While it’s possible to sit in the meditation hall and meditate and conduct spiritual conversations with others and to read books of transcendental philosophy, the really exciting things happen when we go out for a walk by ourselves in the woods. And something in nature purifies us. The experience that we have as we walk and look at trees and leaves, or snow, whatever the condition of the weather may be, washes us.

As you’re walking through the woods, have the sense that you are not only walking through the woods on this earth, but you are walking through the woods of eternity. Feel that when you walk through the world, you’re walking through thousands and millions of worlds. This physical world we see in front of us and around us is only a tiny suggestion of what is.  When we go out and we walk around in the wilds of nature and we tromp down leaves and walk down paths or maybe walk in a place no person has ever been, an aliveness comes into our being, a sense of wellness, a sense of the simple and terrific beauty of the earth.

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. . . . [For] every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.