Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete--and these are substances not easily impressed.

Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand

A basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape.

Knowing another is endless,' Shepherd had written; 'The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree.

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

We are fallen mostly into pieces but the wild returns us to ourselves