Intentions to Carry on a Day Walk
as inspired by The Soul's Red Thread
Drawing on themes from the book, chapter by chapter,
here are intentions you might carry on a Day Walk, each
a different way to deepen the telling of your own life
story.
Foreword: Take a walk with William Stafford’s poem The Way It is.
“There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change . . .
You don’t ever let go of the thread.”
Day walk intention: What are the strands of your own life thread? What are their colors? Where is this life thread, or one strand of it, leading you now?
For the entire Stafford poem and to learn more about the poet,
visit https://www.williamstafford.org/broadsides
Chapter 1: Take a walk recalling when you left your family home as an adolescent.
From chapter 1: “Today was Move-in Day at the dorms: as close to a coming-of-age ceremony as I would ever know. If I had lived long ago, this day would have been far more dramatic.”
Later in chapter 1: “Coming of age, the great start-up phase of a person’s lifelong identity project, takes so much longer than a single hour. One definition of adolescence has it starting at puberty, around twelve years of age, and continuing until twenty-eight.”
Day walk intention: Consider a time during adolescence when you left your childhood home, venturing out into the world. This outward journeying did not suddenly make you into an adult—someone well established in the world—and so, this would have been a classic threshold time. You had died (or were dying) to being a dependent child, but you had not yet been reborn as an adult. Call this “the Great In-between of Adolescence.” What were the major events in your severance from the dependency of childhood? What was it like to be in this Great In-Between? Do you recall a coming-of-age ceremony, a rite of passage, which helped to mark this transition?
Chapter 2: Take a walk revisiting a special Kairos moment in your life.
From James Hollis: “When one is stunned into consciousness, a vertical dimension, Kairos, intersects the horizontal plane of life; one’s life span is rendered in a depth perspective: ‘Who am I, then, and whither bound?’”
From chapter 2: “Perhaps a central measure of each person’s life is not whether Kairos moments ever occur. They happen to us all. But when a deeper realm of your psyche suddenly opens in this way, do you take heed? Do you follow a signpost that points toward a more authentic life?”
Day walk intention: Consider a special Kairos moment in your life. Recall the experience with as much sensual detail as you can. What great lesson, message, or life direction came out of the experience? Did you follow that signpost? How did that experience change you? Did it alter the course of your life?
Chapter 3: Take a walk with an ancestor and listen for the family storyline that you inherited from them.
From chapter 3: “A life story begins before you’re born.”
Day walk intention: Take a walk with one of your parents or grandparents, though call in a version of them from a time before you were born. Have an imaginal conversation. Ask them to tell you the ancestral story that later would become yours to inherit when you were born. What were the major wounds in your ancestral line? What were the major gifts? How have those wounds and gifts shaped who you are to this day?
Chapter 4: Take a walk with yourself as a young adult claiming your place in the world.
From James Hollis: “[The coming of age] passage has as its primary task, then, the solidification of the ego through which the youth gains sufficient strength to leave parents, go out into the larger world, and struggle for survival and the achievement of desire. Such a person has to say to the world: ‘Hire me. Marry me. Trust me.’ And then prove worthy.”
Day walk intention: Return to a time in late adolescence when you were claiming your place in the world as an adult. This likely would have been in your late twenties or thirties, though it could have been earlier or later. Walk with that young adult and have them show you “the landscape of their life.” Look for signs and symbols that represent what your life was like at the time. “Hire me. Marry me. Trust me,” says Hollis. In each of these pursuits—work, intimate relationship, family—did you prove yourself worthy? Which was more important to you at the time: biological family or chosen family?
Chapter 5: Take a walk with solitude and your capacity to be alone.
From chapter 5: “Going on being: the open, vibrant state of a young child who is well-supported in this way. The true self: an instinctual, rooted-in-the-body, spontaneous self that serves as the wellspring for a person’s creativity. The capacity to be alone: a child’s ability to access this imaginative inner place, which later becomes an adult’s ability to do much the same.”
Day walk intention: Consider your own relationship with solitude. As you walk, recall different times in the past when you’ve had extended periods alone, either chosen or unbidden. What have been your own ways of creating alone time? This could be extended time in nature, meditation retreats, or just sitting in a garden sipping tea. When alone, do you easily access the “going on being” state so named by Winnicott? Or is being alone challenging, even anxiety provoking? After you’ve reviewed your past relationship with solitude, then walk with your present relationship with it. Do you value alone time? Do you get enough of it? What gets in the way of you meeting this need? Are there important conversations you need to have—especially with yourself or with a spouse or a partner—about how to foster the alone time that you want and need?
Chapter 6: Take a walk with your capacity to be expansive, to have a bigger view.
From Laurens van der Post: “It is not the beating of the heart. It is utterly different. It is like a finger tapping against the skin of the chest, like a finger on a drum, telling the ear to listen and hear talk of things from a far-off place.”
From chapter 6: “I pick up the new physician mask. The colors of the circular rainbow all converge on the nose at the mask’s center. I pull out the paints and cover the entire nose with sienna brown, transforming it into a desert mountain. On the tip of this earthen nose, I paint myself as a tiny white dot. That’s me. A little speck on a desert mountain. On one side of the tiny speck is the starry night. On the other, a blazing sunrise. Below is the miracle of life. Above, the certainty of death. Just a speck of dust in the cosmos.”
Day walk intention: Choose either of these quotations to explore on a walk.
The law of the tapping: When have you felt this kind of call in your life? To what far-off place were you summoned? Did you obey this law of the tapping? Whether you obeyed it or not, what then happened? If you did go to a far-off place, what was the return home like?
Being a speck of dust in the cosmos: When, if ever, have you had this sort of expansive experience? What were the conditions that helped to create this altered state? How did this change your perception of life? Is this something you are drawn to reexperience or are you more inclined to avoid it?
Chapter 7: Take a walk to help you incorporate a recent experience in the High Country.
From chapter 7: “I say again: three phases of a rite of passage. Severance, threshold, incorporation. Of the three, the most difficult, by far, is the last. Incorporation.
“. . . The Latin word corpus means ‘body,’ and so now your task is to bring whatever gifts you’ve received in the desert back into the Body of Life. But the return, my friends, is not always easy.”
Day walk intention: Have you recently had a High Country experience, be it an extended time alone, a desert fast, a meditation retreat, a guided medicine journey, or something else that created an expansive state? Take a walk to revisit the experience. For this particular day walk, try to go outdoors for at least a half-day. What gift, vision, or boon have you received in the High Country? How has that changed who you are? What are the current challenges of incorporation? Can you commit to two or three tangible steps to help bring the gift back into the lowlands of the ordinary world?
Chapter 8: Take a walk with yourself as a guide in the world.
From chapter 8: “Sitting still, the two desert mantras came back to me. Be still and pay attention. Then ask: What will serve? According to Jen, this was the very essence of wilderness guiding. And it was also the soul of hospice guiding.”
Day walk intention: How are you called to be a guide in the world? When and with whom are you being asked to be still, to pay attention, and to serve? This could be in your work, or as a parent or family member, or as a friend to someone in need, or in some other kind of relationship. What natural gifts do you bring to guiding and supporting others? What are the inherent challenges? Are boundaries an important concern for you?
Chapter 9: Take a walk exploring wild mind.
From chapter 9: “For a human like me, the chasm between the civilized and the wild is so immense that I can barely comprehend what wild even means. For years, I’ve lived a life ruled by a full calendar of clinics, meetings, and home visits. For years, I’ve lived a life forever surrounded by four walls with little sunlight, stable temperatures, and few if any weather challenges. For years, I’ve lived a life clouded by the illusion of connectivity: hours each day addicted to the internet, emails, and texts. What might life be like if I were free of all that? Call this ‘wild mind.’”
Day walk intention: Begin the walk first considering your own relationship with the civilized world. Your awareness of this is like a fish’s relationship with water. It barely warrants attention. Still, consider your own biggest struggles you face in the modern world, be that schedules, work stress, technology, difficult relationships, and/or any other trappings of civilization. At some point in the walk, mark a second gateway, doing your best to leave behind the responsibilities of your daily life. After crossing the threshold, enter a more sensual relationship with your surroundings. Focus on input from one sense at a time. Seeing. Hearing. Smelling. Tasting. Touching. This sensual exploration may be best supported by walking or by sitting still—or by a combination of the two. Be in direct relationship with your environment as best you can. On your way back toward the returning threshold, take time to consider how having a more intimate relationship with the natural world supports your daily life in the modern world. Do you get enough time to cultivate wild mind? If not, how might you make this happen more often?
Chapter 10: Take a walk with your own core story.
From chapter 10: “‘Good on you. Seems you’ve found your way back to the core story of your childhood.’
‘Core story? What do you mean by that?’
‘I’m borrowing here from the teacher Adyashanti. Inside each of us, he says, is an early childhood story that becomes the central hub for much of the storytelling that follows. Most of the later stories—the ones about suffering, anyway—are like spokes radiating out from that childhood wound.’”
Later in chapter 10: “But for me the core story isn’t just about an old wound. There also has been a great blessing: the unconditional love of my mother, which I’ve never doubted.”
Day walk intention: Revisit your early childhood as you walk, all the way back to being a toddler or a young child. What core story took hold inside of you back then? Consider both the wounds that inform that story as well as the gifts. How does this core story continue to live inside of you to this day? What healing work have you been doing—or are feeling called to do—to shift your relationship with this core story?
Chapter 11: Take a walk with the uncertainty of life and the grief that arises from that.
From Joseph Goldstein: “One of my little vipassana mantras came to the foreground. And it was anything can happen anytime . . . We might hear it and think: Oh, that’s kind of a paranoid, defensive way to live. Oh my God, anything can happen anytime. But that wasn’t the effect at all. It was exactly the opposite. By just acknowledging the truth of that—anything can happen anytime—it’s like my heart relaxed. I stopped fighting it. I stopped trying to defend against it. I realized: Yes, this is how things are. And the mind came to a place, really, of great equanimity.”
Day walk intention: Consider your own experiences with this simple truth: Anything can happen anytime. Just in the last year, what versions of “anything” have happened to you? These could be personal events or more public ones. Choose one event (or two, at most) to take with you on the walk. Some kind of dying or near death, physical or symbolic, has likely been a major part of such an event. What died or is presently dying? Where are you now in the grieving process? Are you at a stage where you can create a ritual to mark a letting go or a moving on from the event? If so, how might you best symbolize this letting go? Perhaps a burning, a smashing, or a breaking? Or maybe something gentler, like a quiet burial service in which you bury a symbolic object?
Chapter 12: Take a walk with a great truth that guides you.
From chapter 12: “That’s right. It’s all about passing on my mother’s love. That sounds so trite, so obvious. But isn’t that always the way with life’s biggest insights? If you just speak out loud some great truth, it sounds so banal. All you need is love, or some such thing. A great truth only comes alive when first you feel it deep inside, and then you find ways to bring it into the world. That means learning to live from the inside out. My version is learning to love others by first loving myself. And that starts with loving the wounded little boy inside.”
Day walk intention: Consider where you are in your own life now. What great truth is guiding you these days? How do you feel that truth more deeply and how do you bring it out into the world? Does the expression “learning to live from the inside out” resonate for you at all? If yes, how so? If not, why not?
