I am writing this from the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. It is 15 August, Sfânta Maria Mare — Adormirea Maicii Domnului, one of Romania’s major Orthodox feast days, celebrating the Dormition (falling asleep/death) and passage to heaven of the Virgin Mary, marked by pilgrimages and family gatherings.
Ironically, while thinking and writing about walking, I am temporarily unable to walk myself, immobilised by a sudden and painful kidney stone. So for the moment walking happens mostly in my thoughts, while I watch the sea moving in front of me.

The horizon is wide, luminous blue. Only a few dozen kilometres north of here is Ukraine. The same water reaches another land where movement has a very different meaning for so many people, and where leaving home was not a choice.

It makes me think about why we walk in the first place. Out of curiosity, to meet someone, to discover a place, to think. We walk in pilgrimage and we walk home. Walking gives thoughts another pace and space. But sometimes we walk because we have to leave. Not every walk is chosen.

Here in Romania, people are travelling today to churches and monasteries, meeting their families and following paths walked by many before them. Far away, during these same August days, Obon is celebrated in many parts of Japan. It is of course a completely different cultural and spiritual tradition, but this coincidence stays with me. During Obon, ancestors are believed to return. Families come home, graves are visited, and for a few days those who are absent become present again. Then they leave.

Somehow these very different traditions meet in my thoughts today: around leaving and returning, and how someone absent can still be present. Maybe because I cannot walk myself, sitting here beside the sea, I keep thinking about what walking leaves behind.

On land we leave footsteps, however briefly. On water there seems to be no path at all. I watch a large container boat passing and soon afterwards the surface has closed behind it. Still, so much has crossed this sea. People, certainly, carry their stories and languages with them, and cross borders that may or may not have been of their choosing.

This brings me back to something I have been thinking about for some time: After the Walk. What actually happens when a walk is over?

At some point we stop walking and everyone goes their own way. The footsteps disappear, but strangely enough the walk doesn't always stop there. A conversation comes home with us. A question may suddenly return weeks or years later. Sometimes it is a person we keep thinking about, sometimes a place. And another walk may start from something we didn't finish in the first one.

Maybe After the Walk is less about what remains behind than about what continues to move.

Asked what makes a walk into art, Hamish Fulton famously answered: because you walk it for the first time. But I wonder if there is ever really a first walk.

Wherever we arrive, somebody has been there before us. Inhabitants, travellers, pilgrims, migrants, workers, wanderers. People whose names we know and many more we don't. Animals crossed the same ground. Rivers made paths of their own. We enter places already full of movements, memories and relations.

Every walk takes place after another walk.

And when we leave, something of our passage may continue as well. It doesn't have to be a footprint. It might be a story that travels somewhere else, or a question someone carries away.

I look at the sea again. The boat I watched passing earlier has disappeared from sight, and nothing on the water shows that it was ever there.

But somewhere, it is still on its way.

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