Each Step Slower

I have always been a hippie child. My mam remembers me lying in the grass looking up at the sky and counting my breaths. Long before I knew what yoga or meditation were. Just a girl, small child, blonde hair.

Then I discovered walking.

Back when I was so poorly most days were spent looking out at the world from my window seat, changing from nighttime pyjamas to daytime pyjamas and trying not to feel envy for the freedom everyone else enjoyed.

Then they told me, walk ten minutes a day. Build up. Build strength.

So I did.

Walking from home around the block. Alongside cars and buses and bikes. Trying not to notice the world shift and swirl beneath me or the way my feet and legs were disconnected from my body. Some days I could walk further, other days it was an effort to get beyond the drive.

Years of walking nervously. Determination carrying me to coastlines and lakes. One time dragging my right leg the second half of a walk because my joint had seized up. Just fifteen and struggling with each step. Yet beneath the pain, the palm full of pills pressed onto my tongue for slow relief just in time for getting home, I still loved to walk.

Fresh air. Years spent trapped indoors had made me appreciate the nectar of fresh swirls of oxygen drifting overhead, the sound of boots pressing over fallen leaves and acorns, the smell of rain about to fall.

I grew well. Or a version of it that felt like freedom.

Walking was no longer a physical battle, a mental struggle past pain. It became the flow of my feet one after another pressing down into mother earth. The rhythm of my breath picking up a beat not from panic or pain or fatigue but from the sweet rush of adrenaline from the perfect view, the achievment.

Beside me all the way, a dog. More than a dog. His name is Charlie and his fur is chocolate coloured and he stays by my side as we explore. I see the world anew through those excited amber eyes.

Together we've discovered forests and lakes and hills. We've tasted freedom. Felt it down into our bones. Watched the world become something more than a picture on the other side of a window pane. Fell in love with nature. Found a calm in the arms of nature that can't be found anywhere else - not even on my yoga mat, not even in bed late at the night when the rest of the world is silent.

Here.

Right here.

Each step slower.

We make our own walking meditation.