Lods, France, July 2018
I remembered a conversation I had years ago, with someone I would never meet again. He was a filmmaker type at the birthday celebration of someone I didn’t know at a packed restaurant downtown. All of his sister’s 17 closest friends and family, including me, were crammed around a round table.
“There’s a meditation I practiced, where you put all of your focus on to a single step. You just walk through the woods, with all of your intention in each step you take. And that’s the whole practice”
I was still in the habit of staggering towards lit taxicabs at all hours of the night in cute shoes that betrayed me. I didn’t give much thought to this information, but I nodded my head so that someone would keep talking to me at this party.
Finally, the information seemed pertinent, here in the Juras. I was jamming closer and closer into the shoulder of a winding mountain road. There were cars and motorbikes. The pleasant kind of Sunday-driving road you might want to see in a Lexus ad. The sort of thing you imagine to drift off to sleep. But my vantage point read DANGER, from the sound of fast-moving cars, from the narrowing road, from the disappearing shoulder, and the short limit of what I could see in front of me.
I had gotten here with an audacious sense of confidence. Hungry for experiences outside the abstractions of Wall Street (as traders in Midtown still call it), I found a nebulous kind of map called the Via Francigena. A way to walk to Rome from Canterbury, England. There were infinite unknowns, to be alone walking for three months, to discover four foreign nations, to stay healthy and fit for the physical challenge of walking and running 10 hours a day. But all things considered, I had made it, in one piece, from the jungles of Calais to the picturesque Juras bordering Switzerland.
As the road spiraled up to Pontarlier indefinitely, with no place to walk between the winding cars and motorbikes and mountain edge, I climbed on top of the traffic barriers and stepped forward with precision.
A distant radio played the Rolling Stones, “Look at that Stupid Girl”, I tuned it out and gave all my rich attention to the grips on the bottom of my trailing-running shoes. I didn’t know how much further I would have to go like this, but I had a sense of the distance I was leaving behind with each step.
This was my meditation.