I ran across a quote from Alice Walker today:
“I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.”
And I pulled a Tarot card to explore it:
One would never know it from looking at my fat ass today, but as a teenager and a young adult I was mighty serious about my backpacking and mountain climbing. I think precisely because of what Ms. Walker says in the quote above.
In fact, looking back on it today, I think that I stopped taking church and religion seriously at about the same time I started taking mountaineering seriously. I suppose that I found in the great book of nature that which one expects to find within a church.
And so enters the Nine of Cups. Satisfaction, a satiated hunger. Fulfilment of the need to find the divine. All of that I found, in nature.
But, as the fat ass mentioned above would indicate, responsibilities conspired, as they tend to do, to slow those explorations in nature, to reduce my time in nature. Rambles in the woods were replaced by miles on the freeway. Sitting atop a mountain was swapped for sitting in an office chair. Such is the fate of most who must earn a living in the world of today.
The quote, and the Nine of Cups serve today as a reminder that nature is still out there, indeed close at hand. That the great book of nature, the true expression of the creativity of the divine is always there for us, ready to satisfy our curiosity and our need to experience something truly profound.
We just need to stand up and put one foot in front of the other!
The Northwest Tarot Conference will be taking place September 5 through 7 in Portland, Oregon. I attended last year and had a truly wonderful time. All the information, and tickets are available at:
Walking saved my life in many ways: physical, spiritual, and even financial. If one has the ability to do so, there are ways of incorporating movement throughout the day. Not everyone lives across the street from a park and has a Muggle job that allows them to walk as much as five miles a day like I do; however, many workplaces have complimentary gyms, large parking lots, and/or sprawling hallways and corridors. There are standing desks, including the type that sits on top of a traditional desktop and rises up, and for remote workers, investing in a walking pad beneath one's standing desk can provide movement when one can't access outdoors or gyms. Lastly, public buildings like museums, galleries, and malls often allow folks to breeze through for exercise without requiring a purchase. Anyway, I'm rambling, but I believe 10000000000% that walking can change one's life.