The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.
In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.
Credibility is a basic survival tool.
Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it’s always interesting how many people toss the facts.
Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
I walk wherever my errands take me.
It’s hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.
People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals.
The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.
For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It’s this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you’re some place that’s already interesting. You’re not just between places. Things are happening.
Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.
A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.
There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.
Sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do.
Books are solitudes in which we meet.
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.