“Why do we have bodies?” Santosh, the keeper of Maharashta’s Bedse Caves asked when I visited that ancient Buddhist sanctuary near the end of a 16-day artist’s residency at the Shillim Institute in India’s Western Ghats. His answer, “To know the world outside ourselves,” unexpectedly gave me an ideal summary for my own embodied artistic practice, and especially my experience at Shillim. I had been invited to the 2000 acre nature preserve with no preset program, agenda, or expected outcome. I was there simply to engage with the environment by walking. And I did, with intent and deliberation, yet open to the serendipity and chance encounters that walking inevitably brings. I had never been in a place where I was so conscious of being a guest, and walking as a guest became a means to develop an intimate relationship with an extraordinary – and to me, unfamiliar – landscape. I believe our relationships with places are similar to our relationships with other people. Questions that guide my work both as a walker and as a writer, are: Can we know and care about a place as deeply as we do a friend or loved one? Can that relationship be reciprocal? At Shillim, I had the opportunity to experiment with various ways of coming to know a place through walking, beginning with walks of first acquaintance, where I followed the paths on the resort map curious to see where each line led, then deepening my understanding by walking with expert guides — staff naturalists, a team of ecologists, and forest guards from the nearby village, who shared their intergenerational, indigenous knowledge of the forest and mountains. I supplemented the long, challenging, immersive walks in Shillim’s wilder spaces by poking around service paths to uncover the hidden water, power, and communications infrastructure, which are also integral to any place. Every day I experienced more, and expanded my sense of Shillim as a whole.

I became attuned not just to my own movements but to who and what else moved through and around Shillim: the unseen leopard who marked a tree with his claws, the monkeys who traveled over the trails along a network of trees, the family of quail who scurried across the paved road, the mongoose who slunk up the sloped dry stream bed every morning, and the many birds who filled the valley each morning, and the vines that snaked into the trees. At the end of the residency, I led a walkshop based on a score to attune participants — Institute guests and employees — to edges, borders, and portals that mark transitions through the landscape. After the walkshop, I led a writing workshop, inviting participants to reflect on their own experience and then consider the portals and borders from the perspective of another creature.

I also wrote, curated, and narrated a visual essay about my walking at Shillim, “The Thing to be Known Grows with the Knowing: Walking in the Western Ghats from Ignorance to Intimacy,” which is now shown to welcome and inspire other guests to the preserve.