I think I need to start going for more walks…

Falling in love with an author and reading everything he or she wrote is something I used to do without even thinking about it, as a kid. I would cruise by that author’s shelf at the library every week just to see if there was anything I’d missed. (Sometimes I would find out later the author had been dead for years. Sometimes I would find out there were more books under another name or in another section. Joy!)

My most recent love affairs, with Ellen Gilchrist, Lynda Barry, and Henry James, have been a little more deliberate. But I think if I have to make too much of a project or an effort of it, it’s a sign I’ve picked the wrong author, perhaps out of a misguided wish to be “serious” or to improve myself.

Thank you for your notes!

A “sacred space” is definitely what I’m missing most in my life. The closest thing I probably have right now is the bus ride to and from work (that’s my decompression time, anyways.)

I like your equation: walk = hero’s journey.

Czikszentmihalyi, Campbell, Lynda Barry–they’re all saying the same thing: the highest function of art is to tap into this eternity, this *absence* of time…to capture that magical feeling, that experience, of “flow”…

1. I love the quote about the “sacred place”. For me, when it works right, this is the function of my long walks to the particular park I like. Never thought about it this way before, but really it’s like a hero’s journey away from what’s familiar and into the unknown, even though the unknown is just a catchment pond with a creek and a bunch of trees and wildflowers. Today I watched a little blue heron land in that pond, and when that happened, I wasn’t thinking about what to write on my blog today, or what to have for dinner. I was just watching it.

2. From the illustration, I really like the point that eternity is the *absence* of time, not a *long* time. That, to me, is what tapping into myths / deep stories / sacred places is about: you get appropriately lost in what’s happening, such that you don’t have any consciousness of time – or, to put it alternately, time stops having meaning for you. It makes me wonder whether this is the root of the joy we experience when we sink into the “Flow” state that Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi has described, because one of that state’s distinguishing characteristics is a loss of all sense of time.

This also leads to still other thoughts about the insane ways that we overschedule our working days, especially in corporate America, but I *will* save that for a blog post of my own.