Artists, composers and writers... are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.

There is no division, in practice, between work and life. [An intellectual craft] is a practice that involves the whole person, continually drawing on past experience as it is projected into the future.

native dwellers … learn through an education of attention. The novice hunter … travels through the country with his mentors, and as he goes, specific features are pointed out to him. Other things he discovers for himself, in the course of further forays, by watching, listening and feeling

An imagined landscape, then, is a landscape not of being but of becoming: a composition not of objects and surfaces but of movements and stillness, not there to be surveyed but cast in the current of time.

Our principal contention is that walking is a profoundly social activity: that in their timings, rhythms and inflections, the feet respond as much as does the voice to the presence and activity of others,

Life itself is as much a long walk as it is a long conversation, and the ways along which we walk are those along which we live.

what the effect would be of overturning prevailing assumptions and of adopting … a fundamental orientation towards the ground.

The groundlessness of modern society, characterized by the reduction of pedestrian experience to the operation of a stepping machine, and by the corresponding elevation of head over heels as the locus of creative intelligence, is…deeply embedded in the structures of public life in western societies.

This may seem an odd idea to us, but only because 40 we think of walking as the spatiotemporal displacement of already completed beings from 1 one point to another, rather than as the movement of their substantive formation within 2 an environment. Both plants and people, we could say, ‘issue forth’ along lines of growth, 3 and both exist as the sum of their trails

It is in the very ‘tuning’ of movement in response to the ever-changing conditions of an unfolding task that the skill of walking, as that of any other bodily technique, ultimately resides. Indeed it could be said that walking is a highly intelligent activity. This intelligence, however, is not located exclusively in the head but is distributed throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the human being in the inhabited world.