While unhasting is one of the main reasons why walking — in its many forms, creative or otherwise — has become so relevant to our times, it is unknowing as a method that deepens an embodied understanding of the world, together with undoing as a way of reconnecting with and caring for our more-than-human habitat.

Walking as unhasting, unknowing, and undoing lies at the core of many emerging walking practices today.

Undoing unfolds through what can be described as contemplative ecology in the line of Satish Kumar: an emerging awareness of the necessity to retrieve, from global traditions of spiritual and ancestral thought and practice, our deepest affinities with and commitments to the natural world. Rooted in deep ecology, it recognizes an inherent ecological value independent of human needs and desires, while opening spaces for experiential, embodied, and horizontal forms of learning. It asks us, in a way, to step into attention.

Over the past months, I found myself moving through a convergence of events which I had the pleasure of co-shaping. Most recently, this included the Walking Assembly in Catalonia: a conference in motion and a walking expedition along the Pyrenean river Muga with Tim Ingold and a collective body of artists and researchers dedicated to walking as knowing and learning without teaching. I returned from it only a few days ago, still carrying with me the joy, playfulness, and depth of walking, listening, hammocking, swimming, and being together at the mountain river waters.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this event unfolded simultaneously with the ongoing WALC Online Course, bringing together more than thirty speakers, researchers, artists, and collectives from very different backgrounds, disciplines and territories. Together, they transformed walking into an educational and relational space for more than four hundred participants across the world. (Open call for the remaining sessions.)

At the same time, this intersected with The Walking Body 7 in Guimarães at the end of March, centered on the theme of Freedom — an annual laboratory of walking practices bringing together local communities, art students, and international practitioners and thinkers within an emerging informal School of Walking at the University of Minho. The initiative itself was born somewhat accidentally in 2018, when the new School of Arts building was still unfinished and part of the curriculum had to be rethought outdoors.

Adding to this were dialogues with the initiators of WALKING – Thinking in Movement, a new series of symposia in Switzerland inspired by Lucius Burckhardt’s Promenadology (Spaziergangswissenschaft). (A free online Cafe with Violeta Burckhardt and Johannes Hedinger about Promenadology and their upcoming symposia.)

And above all this hovers WLC as a kind of mothership — the home of walking artists — a house of trust where walking practices are acknowledged and nurtured: a community and living archive of the polyphony of walking arts today. Such a space feels more necessary than ever. During the Walking Assembly  in Catalonia, many people expressed this openly to me and to one another, sometimes speaking from a heartfelt sense of having found an online place where they are not alone. 

An entire movement emerges from perhaps the most humble of human acts: walking.

It may well be that the simplest activities are often the most profound because, stripped to their bare essentials, they remain beginnings — fields of possibility, openings toward what may yet become.

Unhasting, unknowing, and undoing may be among the deepest forms of healing and care still available to us in an era of inhuman acceleration, heavy information overload, and ever-growing and normalized brutality.

Could it be that the response to much of this begins with something as simple as just a walk?

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