I’ve been thinking of Winter. 

It will arrive soon enough and this year I’d like to embrace it, to turn my body, heart, and mind toward its sensations and lessons more even more. For us wild women, there are always further depths to explore when it comes to nature’s teachings and transmissions. 

I was telling a very wise woman in my life about this intention to Winter well & she suggested I saunter (not hike) in the Winter woods, John Muir style. 

Apparently, John Muir, naturalist writer and father of the National Parks, did not care for the word hike. 

The story by Albert W. Palmer, from The Mountain Train and Its Message (1911), goes like this: 

One day as I was resting in the shade Mr. Muir overtook me on the trail and began to chat in that friendly way in which he delights to talk with everyone he meets. I said to him: “Mr. Muir, someone told me you did not approve of the word ‘hike.’ Is that so?” His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied: “I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike!

 

“Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”

 

John Muir lived up to his doctrine. He was usually the last man to reach camp. He never hurried. He stopped to get acquainted with individual trees along the way. He would hail people passing by and make them get down on hands and knees if necessary to see the beauty of some little bed of almost microscopic flowers. Usually he appeared at camp with some new flowers in his hat and a little piece of fir bough in his buttonhole.

 

Now, whether the derivation of saunter Muir gave me is scientific or fanciful, is there not in it another parable? There are people who “hike” through life. They measure life in terms of money and amusement; they rush along the trail of life feverishly seeking to make a dollar or gratify an appetite. How much better to “saunter” along this trail of life, to measure it in terms of beauty and love and friendship! How much finer to take time to know and understand the men and women along the way, to stop a while and let the beauty of the sunset possess the soul, to listen to what the trees are saying and the songs of the birds, and to gather the fragrant little flowers that bloom all along the trail of life for those who have eyes to see!

 

You can’t do these things if you rush through life in a big red automobile at high speed; you can’t know these things if you “hike” along the trail in a speed competition. These are the peculiar rewards of the man who has learned the secret of the saunterer!

More than a hundred years after this story was originally told, the pace of modern life is even faster. The speed can be seductive and intoxicating, and also, numbing and destructive. 

One of the most Earth-honoring, Soul-nourishing, quiet rebellions we can undertake is to saunter reverently through our days – eyes open, breath steady – savoring every single step. 

Happy Sauntering, wild ones. 

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