EXPLORING the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

The fight for free space-for wilderness and for public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.

Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.

Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.

Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.

The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation Never to get lost is not to live.