The Brooklyn Rail

Walking: Foot as Conduit

Is there a force coming up out of the earth that we absorb through our feet while walking? This question has been vapor, been a ghost, been there invisible throughout my walking life. We’d walked, following Richard Jefferies, the 19th-century nature-mystic who came here before, to White Horse Hill and standing above on a green hill that at that moment had been turned into an island, an ephemeral grey sea washing in around its base. Into the green turf carpeting White Horse Hill is cut the Uffington Horse. One hundred meters long, we walked slowly, mindfully from tail-tip to head, dropping between its ears, to stand in its table-like eye where for the first time real words condensed onto my tongue and I said them aloud. What Richard Jefferies knew he absorbed directly from the earth through the bottom of his feet as he walked.