Footloose

Walking restores and comforts me; this has been true for years and never more so than during the pandemic, when that was my break from work in my home office, my office-at-home, and one of my modes of meditation. It was surprising, then, when I recently went through a period of annoyance and perhaps a touch of self-pity when I could no longer drive a car and no longer had one to drive. I was going to have to move from a four-bedroom house to a one-bedroom apartment without a car to run all the little errands and get the things moved that were important to me. You know, the things I randomly needed to have right at hand such that I did not want to consign them to boxes for the movers. For all the larger unwanted stuff, I learned about every donation service that picks up during the pandemic: how, and when.

However, I surmounted most of that challenge up until my adult son moved to his job in Colorado and had a car of his own to drive. Okay, where are the spiritual and financial resources I’m going to need to survive in the suburbs, this epicenter of major causes of climate change but also a way of life that hasn’t changed yet and almost imprisons the non-driver. While I had thrived in off-the-grid advocacy and enjoyed my use of public transportation, I’ve always had a driver’s license and available car (off and on) since I was 16. 

Fortunately, my devotion to public transit had drawn me to a location next to a Metro stop and a grocery store (but more as a backup to any future car repairs than true environmental puritanism). But… how did I really feel about my cart with wheels, my big backpack, and my inability to get to parks and my beloved Brookside Gardens and the many, many other places that only very technically might be reachable without a car. Like… most peoples’ jobs? 

So after a period of very unspiritual whining to myself and grumbling through the (expletive) heat, all the while making plans to join the most radical environmental and civil rights organizations I could find, I decided to do what all of us who harbor contemplative tendencies: get back to walking the talk, which, in my case, meant talking the walk.

Yes, the walk. The walking meditation walk. The long walks. The necessary walks. Braving the ugly sidewalks of Rockville Pike, an outdated highway which apparently was designed by the automotive industrial complex to discourage any attempts to use the human body directly for any sort of locomotion towards a destination. The wait at the multi-turn traffic lights is just as long on foot but much more uncomfortable. But then I remembered my personal credo: don’t just do something, sit there. (In my world all cliches work backwards).  Back home, admittedly in the air conditioning, and after sitting in meditation, I finally accepted what the inward light was telling me: it’s going to be fine once you let go. 

Would sitting quietly and practicing the presence of the Inward Light help me, and others, let go? I think about this as the busyness of the fall descends on us.