In my imagination, there are no sights, sounds, smells, scents or tastes. I cannot recall the faces of people I love. I cannot mentally time travel to retread paths I once knew.

If you could step into my inner world, even for a moment, you’d discover a place that is strangely empty, quiet and dark. For scientists, my brain is an unsolved puzzle; for me, it is simply the way my life has always been. It profoundly shapes my reality. The ways I sense, remember and move through the world are shaped by the silent tracks of my mind.

Although Pilgrimagic was born from my adventures, I did not set out to write an autobiography. This month, though, as I begin a new series on memory, I want to share how my understanding of myself has changed as I’ve learned more about how my mind works. And, as you move through the landscape of your own life, I want to invite you to be curious about the contours of your inner world.

Aphantasia and SDAM

I recently searched back through my journals to find my first mention of aphantasia. It was day 558 of my wandering. I was in turmoil, isolated, lost in myself and struggling to make sense of where I was, what I was doing and who I was becoming. But in the midst of a storm, within and without, the word I needed found me.

For many years, I felt something was wrong with me, but I could not name it. Learning a new word that described my experience, at least in part, was reassuring.

I wasn’t losing my mind. I was taking my first steps in finding it.

My understanding of aphantasia has evolved so much over the last seven years. What started as a realisation that I could not visualise in pictures grew into a recognition that none of my senses were accessible to me internally. Over time, I came to appreciate my quirks. My quiet panic when faced with unfamiliar foods (I can’t imagine taste combinations, so restaurant eating is a perpetual guessing game). My inability to feel the beach’s warm sand in guided visualisations (for years, I thought this was just a curious metaphor). My confusion when faced with colour choices (I can’t picture the contents of my wardrobe, so I have no idea if the jacket I’m buying will go with my shirts).

A more profound discovery came when I realised that my memory was different too. I had always known that my grasp on my personal history was tenuous, and I struggled to order events in time. I would look at old pictures of myself and feel I was seeing a stranger. I knew that things had happened to me, but my memory was a perpetual blank. At times, I worried about my mental health, as waves of derealisation and depersonalisation overwhelmed me. I felt lost in a life that was incomprehensibly strange and disorienting.

I learned another term: severely deficient autobiographical memory, or SDAM. For years, I had also been adapting to this condition by taking photographs, collecting treasures and journalling my journey, all without realising their significance. I came to understand that these images, objects and words were essential containers of my past. Of myself.

I grieve for the years when I let those practices go; I have long stretches of my life that are lost to me forever. I spent a lot of time in therapy reconciling myself with the unanswerable questions of who I once was.

The memories I can hold in my hands are immeasurably precious.

Difference as a gift

I live perpetually in the present moment. That might sound like an ideal state; many mindful walking practices encourage people to be more aware of what is happening now. But in truth, today’s path is the only place I can be.

On good days, I make a joke of my absent episodic memory, telling people that significant events in my life happened sometime before today. But living with SDAM is hard work. It is socially awkward to meet people who have fond recollections of our time together, when I recall nothing at all. Everyday acts of remembering, from filling in address histories to preparing for job interviews, involve piecing together scraps of documented personal history. When I am tired, sad or in pain, it can be impossible to reflect on happier times.

I do not have an innate sense of myself as a continuous being who has persisted through time. But my body is a perpetual reminder of my permanence. My left arm is tattooed with the story of my early journey as a druid. My aching bunions talk to me about the long paths I have walked. The words I wrote in old journals created the patch of rough skin on my right index finger.

In many ways, SDAM frees me from the burden of personal history. I am not invested in who I was ten years ago; that person does not walk today’s steps. Holding my history lightly makes me adaptable in the face of new challenges. My ability to change course suddenly can disorient those around me, but the people who know me best know the constancy of my heart. My memories may be hidden from me, but I see my enduring values reflected in the faces of those I love.

And for all the frustrations of aphantasia, I have come to be profoundly grateful for its gifts. It pushes me to observe the details of the world, to translate my smallest experiences into words, to collect the ordinary shells on the beach, to photograph the unremarkable views. Patterns of light on the hillside are encoded as stories I tell myself. Paths I walk today hold the traces of yesterday’s footsteps.

Every journey, even a stroll around the block, is an opportunity to be present. If my mind is elsewhere, it can never come back to this moment. If I do not remember to remember, I will forget.

Walking with your mind

Everything I understand about my aphantasia and SDAM has been learned on my feet. It is walking that has taught me how my mind moves through the world. How quickly I leave moments behind. How much I rely on stories, objects and images to hold what I cannot keep inside. Step by step, my mind has morphed from a formless void into a landscape I can navigate.

As you walk through your own days, you carry a different inner reality. Perhaps your memories are rich scenes you can re‑enter at will. Perhaps they are more like mine: thin, factual or scattered. Perhaps you hear birdsong, or feel movement in your muscles, or sense nothing at all. However your perception works, it shapes the stories you tell about your life, and the paths you choose next.

So, as you move through the landscape of your life this month, I invite you to pay attention to how you meet the world.

How do you recall your last walk? What comes back to you: images, sounds, sensations, emotions, words or silence? What do you lean on to remember: photos, maps, routines, conversations, the feel of a familiar hill under your feet? There is no right way to perceive, only your way.

And if, in noticing your differences, you begin to feel strange or out of place, know this: Even when your inner world feels opaque to you, the living world recognises you entirely. The path still recalls the pattern of your stride. The wind still remembers the shape of your body. Your more‑than‑human kin still know who you are.

Every walk is a meeting between your particular mind and the earth’s enduring presence. You may forget today’s footsteps. The land will remember.

At some point on your path, a homecoming is waiting for you. It may be a return to a place, a practice, a person or a version of yourself that you left behind. It may be something you can barely name, but you feel it like an ebb tide pulling you towards deep water.

This month, Pilgrimagic has been exploring the many paths of return. The turning of wood, and the unforgetting of purpose. The mystery of the eel’s migration, the magic of Welsh cauldrons, the poet’s invitation to trust the mis takes, and the long, costly journey of a displaced humanity searching for a new home. In the world outside, April has been practising its own return, with colour in the hedgerows, bees remembering their flowers, and spring doing what only spring can do.

My hope, always, is that Pilgrimagic doesn’t only occupy a corner of your mind for a brief moment as you read, but that it encourages you to move through the world and find your own path. So at the end of each month, I’m pausing to reflect, and offering ideas for you to continue your own homeward journey.

The prompts and practices below are invitations to explore the returning path, through writing, through movement and through stillness.

The door is open and the kettle’s on if you want a brew. When you are ready, welcome home.

Prompts and practices

There are many ways to come home, and the journey of the return often continues long after our physical homecoming. These prompts and practices are invitations to notice and honour the returning path.

The inherited map

Prompt: The eel returns to a river it has never swum, guided by a pattern inherited from its parents. What have you inherited, whether stories, instincts or longings, that seem to know the way home even when you don’t? What is the oldest part of you that still knows where it is going?

Practice: Tracing the line

• Find a photograph of a parent, grandparent or ancestor, or a mentor who has guided your steps.

• Notice one thing you recognise in yourself that you learned from: a gesture, a tendency, a way of moving through the world.

• Holding that thought in your mind, take a short walk and notice where your feet take you without further conscious decision. Let that impulse be a message from the deep map you carry.

Owning your mis takes

Prompt: Poet Rosamond S. King asks how you might return, “after discards, attempts and mis takes”, to your original genius. What is one discarded version of yourself, such as a path not taken, an abandoned dream, a crossed-out paragraph of your life, that still carries something worth returning to? What does it know that you have forgotten?

Practice: The crossed-out page

• Take a piece of paper and write, in one sentence, something you once wanted that you later abandoned.

• Cross it out, not to erase it, but to honour it as part of your story.

• Beneath the crossing-out, write one word that the abandoned thing still offers you now.

• Keep the paper.

The transforming cauldron

Prompt: Ceridwen’s cauldron transforms. So does Brân’s, although one returns you changed and living, the other mute and altered. Think of a transformation in your own life that changed you so fundamentally that return felt impossible. What did you bring back that you didn’t have before? And what, honestly, did you lose?

Practice: Two hands

• Sit quietly and hold your hands open in your lap, palms up.

• In your left hand, name what the transformation took from you. Let yourself feel its weight.

• In your right hand, name what it gave you that you could not have found otherwise.

• Close your hands slowly, then open them again. What you carry is both.

A pollinator’s fidelity

Prompt: Floral constancy, the bee’s faithful return to the same patch of flowers, is both instinct and learned commitment. What in your life calls you back repeatedly: a place, a practice, a person, a question? What is the flower you return to, season after season, because something in the encounter still nourishes you?

Practice: Return to the familiar

• Choose somewhere within a short walk that you have been to many times before.

• Go there, not to do anything, but simply to return.

• Arrive. Offer a greeting. Notice what has changed since you were last there. Notice what hasn’t.

• Ask: What does this place still have to offer me?

A leap of faith

Prompt: Sometimes, we must abandon the search for a longed-for home and settle for one that is strange and new, trusting that it is enough. Is there a homecoming in your own life that requires letting go of what you think home should look like? What would it mean to arrive somewhere unexpected and choose, consciously, to call it home?

Practice: A small arrival

• On your next walk, stop at a point that is not your destination, like a bench, a gate, a place where the path bends.

• Rest for a short while and practice the feeling of having arrived.

• Let this be, for now, enough. Notice what that does to your body.

Endnote: Homecoming

I lost my home as a child. In the wake of my mum’s death, my family fractured and I found myself far away in a strange land. This foundational experience has shaped my life for decades. I remember my mum with white flowers. And I carry a deep longing for home in my soul.

Of course, I cannot go back. My unbereaved nine-year-old self is lost in my history. The magical cauldrons of resurrection are shattered. My journey of return, much as it is, is a path of continuing on, making peace with an unalterable past and finding a new home in myself.

In writing this month’s articles, the image of wood turned on a lathe has stayed with me. I am worn down by my wandering, but something beautiful emerged from the turning. The years of my home-seeking are made manifest in the smoother surface of my increasingly settled being.

The more I look, the more I see the return in every movement of the living world, too. Colour returning in spring, bees returning to their favourite flowers, migrating birds returning to feed, rest and raise a new generation in the bay near my home. Nature teaches a vital, cyclical lesson that departed things sometimes come back. The patterns of life show the fragile promise of the return.

Tales of return tug at the loose strings of my heart. From the wild uncertainty of the eel’s migration to a story of humanity fleeing across the stars, each perspective weaves those threads together in new ways, making my life more whole.

Perhaps most of all, this is why I walk. Not for the expectation of departure, not for the anticipation of arrival, but for the always-to-be-fulfilled promise of return. If departure and return are part of the ongoing flow of life, I can accept that being at home, whether in a place, a way of being or an identity, is only ever temporary.

And so I keep walking, not toward a determined end, but along a returning path that keeps teaching me the way.

After the grey days of winter, April’s flowering is a relief. Colour returns to hedgerows, fields, woods and gardens. Young green leaves unfurl from branches, stems shoot upwards and sun-seeking petals open in expectation.

Amid the return of colour, another returning buzzes with harmony. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle noted that the bee “flies from one violet, say, to another violet, and never meddles with another flower until it has got back to the hive.” Floral constancy is both fixed through co-evolution and learned through experimentation. A pollinator faithfully returns, guided by instinct and experience, because both the insect and the flower benefit.

Across generations, life flourishes in repeating patterns of familiarity and commitment.

As I dodge April’s showers, the colours of the world invite me to notice what is returning in me: new life from fallow soil, vibrancy from drabness, interdependence from winter’s solitude. I know this season will pass into the ease of summer and the falling colours of autumn. But for now, it is enough to simply witness.

I am made of the stories too: Stories I’ve been told, stories I tell myself and stories I carry in the layers of my soul, waiting to be uncovered by the lathe’s turning. These stories shape my direction through life.

As I walk the returning path, four unlikely stories keep me company. Across oceans of water and stars, through the boiling of cauldrons and the working of a poet’s pen, I’m carrying stories of memory, transformation, mis takes and homecoming.

Eels

In April, the waters of Morecambe Bay teem with life. Carried on the high spring tides, shoals of glass eels are swept towards the mouths of the rivers that pour into the deep. Transparent as water and barely visible, they make repeated attempts to cross into fresh water, then slip between rocks and reed beds as they continue their journey home.

Except it is a home they have never known. Nobody knows quite how they make their way back to the places their parents swam, but each eel is guided to a precise stretch of freshwater. They’ll live in these rivers for years, until one day, another journey will call them.

They’ll swim down river, across the bay, through the Irish Sea and out into the open ocean. Thousands of miles later, in the Sargasso Sea, they will mate, spawn and die.

Decades from now, if they survive, their children will once again swim on the spring tide into the bay. The tragedy of this generational migration is that European eels are critically endangered. In their abundance, they were prized for their meat. But their population has declined by around 95%, lost to overfishing, river barriers and a changing ocean.

Much of the eel’s life remains a mystery. Though scientists have tracked them to their ocean spawning grounds, the moments of their birth and death have never been observed. We may never know how the pattern of departure and return is passed from parent to child. But every eel knows where it has come from, and where it is going. Through oceans and rivers, it finds its way.

Cauldrons

Eels are changed by their journey. In preparation for their return to the Sargasso Sea, their eyes widen to adapt to the deep ocean waters, and their bodies turn silver as they lay down fat for the journey. Once they leave their rivers, they will never eat again.

The old tales of Wales are similarly rich with stories of bodily transformation. Gwion Bach is changed forever by three drops of awen that splash from the goddess Ceridwen’s cauldron, and he flees from her fury in a pursuit of multiple, magical metamorphoses. Finally, he becomes a grain of wheat that she, as a great brown hen, consumes. His return, through the nurturing of her womb, transforms him yet again into the radiant-browed bard, Taliesin.

In Branwen’s branch of the Mabinogi, we meet another cauldron, the Pair Dadeni, belonging to Brân the Blessed. Its boiling water restores the dead to life but leaves them mute. Gifted to Matholwch, king of Ireland, as a failed peace offering, it turns death into an inexhaustible military resource, heralding a perpetual, speechless returning that makes their conflict unwinnable. To bring the war to an end, Efnisien hides among the Irish corpses and stretches himself inside the cauldron until it cracks. He dies in the act. His self-sacrifice destroys the cauldron and finally breaks the cycle of resurrection.

Ceridwen’s cauldron of inspiration and Brân’s cauldron of rebirth speak not just to the power of return, but the peril. Journeys of return change us, and sometimes not for the better. We can only enter the cauldron; how we return is in the hands of mystery.

Poems

I am a prose writer, not a poet. I feel the difference most when I reach for precision and find that words slip like water through my fingers.

So as I write each week, I edit. Sentences move, phrases are restructured, sometimes whole paragraphs are deleted. Telling a story, whether of eels or cauldrons, requires a commitment to transformation. In electronic form, the finished product bears no trace of its revisions.

But life is not that way. Even if we are profoundly changed by our journeys, altered to the depths of our souls, traces of the past remain in our hearts, minds and bodies.

A great poem can shine light on the truth of who we are. Many poets have trod the homeward path, but one simple poem that I’ve been carrying recently is Rosamond S King’s Do Not Trust The Eraser.

Do not trust the eraser. Prefer
crossed out, scribbled over monuments
to something once thought correct
. Instead: colors, transparencies
track changes, versions, iterations
. How else might you return
after discards, attempts
and mis takes, to your 
original genius
?

The editor’s pen knows something the eraser doesn’t, that the mis takes are the map. Taliesin could not have returned without Gwion Bach’s flight. The eel cannot return without first entering the river.

Spaceships

My final story of return begins on the far side of the universe.

The remnants of humanity are fleeing their home, destroyed in a near genocide by beings of their own making. Fighting for survival, guided by ancient prophecy and strange visions, they leap from crisis to crisis in search of a new home they only know as Earth.

I was first introduced to Battlestar Galactica in my 30s, and over the past two decades, it’s become my ultimate comfort watch. BSG is, ultimately, a story about hope, about destiny, and about what it means to be human.

For anyone who intends to watch the show, there are significant spoilers ahead.

There are philosophical threads that run through the story, like the belief that this is not all that we are, and the mantra that “all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” The remnant of humanity, their dwindling population written in slowly shrinking numbers on a white board, comes to realise that they authored their own demise.

When they eventually find Earth, they find that it too is a wasteland of nuclear destruction. Their promised land flows with undrinkable water. Blackened, radioactive soil runs through their fingers. Broken by the revelations, they resolve to move on, but one of their number chooses to remain and die among the bones of her ancestors. Hope dies with her. Their journey across the stars limps on.

Return in BSG isn’t a simple matter of finding a new home. The show raises the profound question of whether it’s possible for us to break the seemingly unending cycle of hubris. Humans are trapped in repeating patterns we barely understand, guided by hopes and memories we never fully grasp, and all the time we walk in fear that our self-destruction is inevitable.

We may find a home, we may find a way to start again, but the journey requires sacrifice, compromise and, ultimately, a leap of faith.

Lessons of return

The four stories teach a clear lesson. Returning is not a simple matter of standing at my front door and turning a key in the lock. The journey of return changes me. It transforms my being, places me in the hands of mystery and forces me to reckon with my mis takes. If I am standing only in ruins, my journey is not yet complete.

As I walk the returning path, my steps are guided by practical hope. It may be impossible to go back, but I can walk towards a better future, even if it lies out of sight beyond the horizon. I travel with stories that keep me company, wrap me in warmth on cold nights and remind me that the sun rises again.

Hope, in the end, is as much a choice as a feeling. And hope keeps me walking until I am home.

Going further

• If you’re interested in reading the story of Brân’s cauldron, you’ll find it in the second branch of the Mabinogi. I recommend Sioned Davies’ translation. The story of Taliesin appears in some editions of Lady Charlotte Guest’s original translation of the Mabinogion (though it doesn’t strictly belong in the collection), and I wouldn’t recommend the whole book.

• Rosamond S King’s poem, Do Not Trust The Eraser, was originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 1, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

• The introductory two-part miniseries and all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica are currently available in the UK to stream free (with ads) on ITVX.

So many accounts of pilgrimage and transformative hiking focus on the moment of arrival. Someone leaves home, wanders to a distant shrine, high mountain or sacred valley, and their encounter with mystery profoundly changes them. They meet the earth, its more-than-human inhabitants and themselves on the path.

Reflecting on their outbound journey, they tell stories of physical hardship, emotional upheaval and spiritual transcendence. But there’s a crucial element that is often missing from these accounts.

The return.

Anthropologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep identified three common phases of a rite of passage: separation from day to day concerns, entry into a transformative liminal space, and a journey home that allows the wanderer to incorporate their learning and live a new story.

This month, I want to explore the homeward path. What does it mean to come back from a journey? How do we step over the threshold of our homes transformed by our experiences? And what if we realise that we have changed while the world around us hasn’t?

How can we return?

On returning

The word return doesn’t mean quite what you think it means. It seems easy enough to parse its etymology: re means again and turn sounds much like turning a corner.

Except the turning of the return is of a different nature entirely. Follow the thread of language through human history and you find another meaning at its root. The turning of a piece of wood.

When wood is clamped to a lathe, it holds a still point at its centre. A rough piece of wood, hewn from a tree and dried in a pile, is worn away through friction to reveal something smooth and perfectly formed. Edges, unevenness and splinters are cast aside. The ground around the lathe is showered with sawdust, but something beautiful and useful begins to emerge.

Without the endless spinning of a rough chunk of timber, the fine-grained elegance of the wood cannot be revealed. Turning takes time, dedication and the skill of a turner who senses what could be hidden in layers of annual rings. Aged wood, knotted with the uneven growth of a hundred summers, reveals itself in lines and patterns.

Unturned, the lessons of growth embodied in a tree remain unrevealed. Carved with chisels and polished to perfection, the wisdom of years shines.

The one who returns

As turning reveals something hidden deep within wood, so the work of the return path allows a different type of being to emerge.

Life changes us. Experience changes us. Encounter with mystery changes us. But I think that the truth of the return is not so much that it fundamentally alters us at our core, but that it wears away the sawdust to show us what always lay just beneath the surface.

Stripped of everything that is no longer beautiful or useful, many people return from profound journeys to find that they are different. Fragile and raw in their newness, but filled with a refound sense of purpose. In the wake of my journey along the Camiño dos Faros, it took me days to find my feet, weeks to revisit my journal entries, and, in truth, years to fully comprehend the magnitude of what had been altered in me. Though I’ve settled now, the journey of the return continues in me every day.

One insight that helps me is that the return is not a journey back, but a journey forward. I am not a passenger with a return ticket, picking up everyday life where I left off. The lathe of the return revealed a different shape to my becoming.

The psychologist James Hillman suggests that each person arrives in the world with a unique image already present in their soul. We each carry a complete, latent pattern of the life that wants to be lived. Just as an acorn contains the entire form of the oak, the soul carries its own destiny from the beginning.

Hillman is drawing on an ancient philosophical idea. Anamnesis. Unforgetting. The one who returns isn’t made into someone new. The turning has reminded them who they are.

The friction of the journey wears away what was added. And what remains, fine-grained and chisel-etched, is not the person who left home. It is who they were always meant to become.

Observing the return

April is the season of the return. In the wake of Alban Eilir’s balancing warmth, summer inches closer. In the bay near my home, oystercatchers are returning to their breeding grounds on shorelines and saltmarshes. Arctic terns rest on quieter beaches, briefly pausing their life of pole-to-pole motion to hatch the next generation. Natterjack toads climb from their deep dune burrows to fill the night air with their song. More-than-human life, in all its abundance and richness, is unarguably present in its own becoming.

There is much to learn from the return of others. Whether we are resting temporarily in places of familiar security or digging ourselves out from the depths of winter, the living world around us is abundant with teachers, eager to show us the truth of their own returning.

I walk out on the beach at sunset, and feel their presence around me. Confident, grounded, wholly inhabiting their unique place in the vast expanse of shifting sea, sky and land, the more-than-human community calls me to find my place, too. The surety of their return echoes my own. I stand with certainty, knowing that this is the place.

While the living world welcomes me, humanity can too often offer friction. Becoming who I am shifts the pattern of relationships with the people around me. Changed by my journey, I am not the person who left. My returned shape takes up a different space in the world, and the familiar roles I filled may no longer fit me well. All of this takes adjustment, not just for me, but for those who love and rely on me. The return path demands patience, forbearance and a deep acknowledgement that others have gone on living their lives in my absence.

Physically, I am home. Being at home may take time.

Whether you are returning from an adventure or coming back to a renewed sense of yourself, this month, I invite you to walk the return path alongside me. In the weeks ahead, we’ll discover stories of the homeward journey, find the evidence of return written into the April landscape, and sit together with questions that may take longer than a month to answer.

There’s no arrival to aim for. Only the turning, and what it reveals.

Throughout March, I’ve been exploring the idea of direction, and this month’s articles have been full of compass points and signposts. They point to an urgent question that I carry, and perhaps you do too.

How do I orient myself when the old maps no longer work?

Looking back this month, I see the patterns of human navigation: the earth as foundation, the sky as wonder, the compass as story, and the signpost as shared wisdom. Pilgrimagic, at its heart, is my attempt to trust the path that weaves across that mysterious landscape, and to invite you to experiment with finding your own direction, one small step at a time.

Whether you are reading the contours of your local environment or exploring the narratives of north, south, east, and west through literature, know that you are actively reshaping the stories that guide you. And, in time, you’ll find your way to a better map.

As a new rhythm for Pilgrimagic, at the end of each month, I’m pausing to look back at the path I’ve walked. And I want to offer you some prompts and practices. The prompts are ways to write and think your way into the possibilities of direction. The practices are ways to respond to your orientation in the world, so you can feel the questions in the stillness and movement of your body.

Pursue one way, both or neither. The choice, as always, is yours.

Prompts and practices

What follows isn’t a map with fixed routes, or even a reliable compass that will show you the way. Instead, these prompts and practices are a small bundle of questions and experiments. See where they take you.

Your local compass

Prompt: Directions are not just bearings on a map; they are narratives we tell about the world we live in. If you discarded the traditional compass, how would you orient the geography of your soul to your local landscape? What weather patterns, elements or natural phenomena live to your personal north, south, east and west?

Practice: Reading the world

• Stand outside in a familiar place.

• Notice where your weather comes from, where the light feels strongest and where solid ground lies.

• Turn to face the direction that pulls your soul the most strongly today and take three slow breaths. Call its qualities to yourself.

Your inner map

Prompt: Each direction carries its own associations: east as beginning, west as ending, north as stillness, south as warmth. Or perhaps they mean something else to you. If you treated your life as a compass rose, what qualities or memories would you place at your north, south, east and west? Which way are you unconsciously facing today?

Practice: Drawing your directions

• Sketch a simple cross on a page and label the ends north, south, east and west.

• At each point, jot a few words for what that direction means to you now (for example, “north: responsibility”, “south: play”, “east: new work”, “west: grief”).

• Circle the direction that feels most alive or insistent today and consider how it might be steering your choices.

Above and below

Prompt: We travel in three dimensions, journeying across the plane between the reliable earth and the expansive sky. When you feel lost, do you look down for grounding, or do you look up for possibility?

Practice: The vertical gaze

• Take a short walk and spend two minutes deliberately looking down.

• Notice the concrete, grass, mud or pebbles supporting you, and let your soul descend to greet the ever-present earth.

• Then, spend two minutes looking up.

• Notice how the sky bends close with cloud or stretches into a spacious vista, and embrace the realm of possibility.

Trusting the signs

Prompt: Unlike birds and butterflies guided by biology and geomagnetism, we humans are often lost in the world. We find our way through cooperation. Whose signposts of wisdom and guidance do you rely on to navigate your life?

Practice: Follow a sign

• On your next walk, find a physical signpost, a waymarker or a desire path worn into the grass.

• Pause to acknowledge the collective ingenuity and memory of the people who placed it or walked there before you.

• Take a step forward, consciously deciding to use their guidance to forge a journey that is uniquely your own.

Animal navigation

Prompt: Think of a more-than-human being whose migrations or homing instincts amaze you, like an arctic tern, eel, swallow, whale or worm. What quality of direction‑sensing does this being embody, and how might that quality live in you as well?​

Practice: Borrow a compass

• Choose one animal you see often, like a gull, crow, blackbird, dog or snail.

• Spend five minutes simply watching how it moves, pauses and chooses its path.

• Take a short walk as if you carried that same inner compass, adjusting your pace or route in small ways that mirror what you observed.

Endnote: Directions

Like many people writing on Substack, I have a content calendar that guides my writing. Every few months, I plan out the direction I might take, so that each week’s writing tasks arrive as fully formed prompts, rather than a panicked scrabbling for ideas. In the rush of life, some structured foresight smoothes out the peaks and troughs of creative inspiration.

This month’s calendar prompted me to consider ritual and symbolism, and I wanted to begin by reflecting on how people through history have marked the directions of ceremonial space. But diving into research for the first article, I found something altogether more intriguing: a story about the directions themselves. North, south, east, west, up and down captured my attention.

Across times and cultures, and in both hemispheres of the earth, east and west held special significance. Countless temples, circles and sacred sites were oriented to the rising or setting of the sun, sometimes at the balancing point of the equinox, sometimes at other times of year. Before the persistence of electric lighting, dawn and dusk ordered the rhythms of life across days and seasons. Even today, east and west define what it means to be human from our first dawning to our final journey into the shadows.

North and south, on the other hand, are more like feelings and intuitions. They are stories told at campfires as we gaze upwards and seek the reassuring still point of the cosmic poles. Heat and cold, height and depth, fire and stone may switch depending on our hemisphere, but we notice that something changes when we move across the sun’s westward path. That sense of the directions as explorable mysteries led me to Jerry Brotton’s book, Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction, and onwards into the stories that shape my understanding of what the compass points and their elemental connections mean to me. I encourage you to follow that trail for yourself, if it intrigues you. It is enlightening to follow a trail of words, just as much as a path of dirt.

Still, within the landscape of directions that stretch to the endless horizon, I need to find my way. I’d heard tales of migrating animals sensing the earth’s geomagnetism, but digging deeper into the biology of more-than-human navigation floored me. Here I am, dependent on my phone, satellites and generations of human mapping to find my way, when the arctic tern resting in the bay near my home will reliably fly north and south, covering a distance three times to the moon and back during their lifetime. Even the most skilled human navigators must stand in awe of beings who carry such certain direction in their moving bodies.

I hope this week’s prompts and practices help orient you to the compass points of your life, and support you to take a step in a direction that calls to your soul. Finding yourself is as much knowing where you are going as understanding who you are. Call the directions to yourself, sense them in the landscape you inhabit and let them shape your onward path.

In reality, a step in any direction can be a step forward. But next month, I’m taking a step back to explore a different type of journey: the return. I hope you’ll join me on the path that leads you home.

The sophistication of our maps, satellites and trackers disguises a deeper truth. We humans are lost in the world.

On a cloudy day, when grey light is diffused across the sky, how can we find our bearings? Familiarity with the earth beneath our feet can orient us. But in uncharted land, every direction is possible. Without a compass to show us the way, we are everywhere and nowhere.

Unlike us, migratory birds, monarch butterflies and sea turtles can sense the flow of geomagnetism. Whether through photoreceptor proteins in their eyes that bend light with the earth’s forces, or tiny particles in magnetite in their tissues, these extraordinary beings know which way is north. Their biology guides their journeys.

In contrast, we humans cannot even reliably tell which way is up. Tumbled in avalanches, our bodies confuse the weight of snow for down, and many stricken mountaineers have buried themselves deeper in their attempts to reach safety. But a simple seed planted deep in the darkness does not need light to guide it. Inside specialised cells called statocytes, starch-filled organelles settle with gravity, prompting proteins to orient roots down and stems up.

Unlike our more-than-human kin, we find our way through cooperation with one another. Those who came before us collaborated with the earth beneath their feet to leave tracks across the land. Generations of footsteps marked out the direction of their desires. And, if we are lucky, signposts stand now, rooted in the earth, to show us the ways they travelled.

Signposts are a silent testament to the collective ingenuity of human navigation. We may not be able to sense direction in our bones, but we are unique in our ability to inscribe our shared intentions on the world around us. Signposts point the way across moors, along coastlines, up mountains, through woods. They lead us to new perspectives, turning points and unexpected discoveries.

To follow a sign is to trust in the wisdom of those who went before us. We may tread where others trod, but we make these paths our own.

A few days ago, Jerry Brotton’s Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction, landed on my doormat. I’ve been rapidly devouring the book, which considers the directions not just as bearings on a map, but as narratives we tell about the world and our place in it.

Brotton argues north, south, east and west are cultural inventions, loaded with power, imagination and prejudice. Terms like the West, the Global South, the Orient are not simple descriptors, but shorthand for whole worldviews. Directions, from Brotton’s perspective, are arguments about who we are and how we think the world is arranged. That makes them fertile ground for a reading list.

What follows is an invitation rather than a canon. I’ve chosen four books I love from different genres, one of each point of the compass. I hope they prompt you to explore the stories that orient your world.

North: The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

If north has a literature, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain might be one of its foundational texts. Crafted from a lifetime of walking in the Cairngorms, Shepherd’s book is not a heroic mountaineering narrative, but an insistent turning towards the qualities of height, light and air. Shepherd circles familiar peaks, revisiting the same plateau, corries and burns in different seasons, always refusing the simple satisfaction of conquering summits in favour of simply being with the mountains.

I first read Nan Shepherd’s book in the wake of failing to climb Ben Nevis. My too-early morning had been a maelstrom of disappointment, relief and replanning, as I left the group I was walking with and headed for home. But I had a little time changing trains in Glasgow, and The Living Mountain called to me from the shelves of a bookshop near the station. The balm of Shepherd’s writing was soul-soothing.

What stays with me now is how the book helped me find my bearings. Shepherd is constantly losing and refinding her way, whether in cloud, snow or the whiteout that erases paths. North, in her hands, is less a fixed arrow and more a practice of attention. She writes about wind on her skin, about the feel of granite underfoot, about the altered state that comes from moving repeatedly through the same heights until the mountain reveals its heart.

The Living Mountain is a long in‑breath of cold air. It also complicates any easy idea that north is only about the hardness of stone. There is an extraordinary tenderness in the way Shepherd pays attention to water, moss, light and her own body.

East: Claxton by Mark Cocker

Some of my childhood was spent in East Anglia, and I retain a deep love for the wide skies, coastal pines and gentle hills of Suffolk. My next book recommendation crosses the historic divide between the north and south folk of the region, and offers an exploration of a small patch of rural Norfolk.

Mark Cocker’s Claxton is a year of field notes from a single parish, in which he explores the bounds of the village and pays close attention to what is happening just beyond his front door.

Claxton is rooted in its commitment to observation and specificity: a flock of geese, the song of a blackbird in January, the subtle change in colour across a field as a crop emerges from the earth. Cocker paints a portrait of his corner of East Anglia as an intricate living system, constantly shifting under the combined pressures of weather, agriculture and climate breakdown. The book never strays far from home. Its drama is local, seasonal and incremental.

Reading Claxton, I sense the soil and roots beneath me, hedgerows that stretch along winding lanes, and the horizontal expanse of the English arable landscape. Cocker’s east is a direction of patience, repetition and familiarity, where coming to know a place is a matter of making the same short walks in different light. Claxton feels like a reassuringly honest kind of nature writing, and a reminder that I never have to travel far to go deeper.

Claxton isn’t simply a story of earth, but a lesson in how we have collectively reshaped and denuded it. Reading Cocker’s work with the compass in mind, east becomes not only a place of grounded fertility, but a direction to reckon with what intensive agriculture and extraction have done to the more‑than‑human world.

West: The Secret Knowledge of Water by Craig Childs

If I were shortlisting places to learn about the power of water, I would not include a desert. But absence is a rich teacher, and my time wandering in Nevada, Utah and Arizona profoundly shifted my perspective.

I’d arrived in Las Vegas on the back of a different watery adventure, kayaking from fresh water to sea loch in the Scottish highlands. In the intense heat of the Mojave Desert, I was miles from the ocean but emotionally at sea. My first night beyond the city, I settled in a campground, only to find that my tent pegs - so dependable in the loamy, friable earth of a British field - were defeated by the concrete-hard, sun-baked earth. I slept a fitful night under the stars. Perhaps I only dreamed of a coyote’s hot breath on my cheek.

Over the days that followed, I came to realise that I was tracking water. I marvelled at the Colorado river’s patient carving from the Grand Canyon’s north rim, and stood in her ice-cold, dam-filtered waters at Lees Ferry. Further upstream, I camped on a riverbank near Moab, where the river runs slow and red. “Too thick to drink, too thin to plough,” the old settlers would say. And finally, somewhere in the canyonlands of the high mountain plateau, I knelt by a sparkling stream to honour the vast watershed that makes the Colorado’s seaward journey possible.

Craig Childs’ The Secret Knowledge of Water is a visceral reminder that deserts are shaped by water, and not only in the layers of sedimentary rock raised up from ancient sea beds and carved by rain and rivers. Flash floods rip through dry washes, while watering holes hold just enough liquid to sustain a scattering of tiny lives. In his exploration, he learns to read the land for signs of moisture, to understand how animals and plants find and remember water, and to respect how quickly this landscape punishes anyone who assumes it will behave kindly.

The watery west here is not the soft, blue distance of a sea horizon, but a direction of exposure and risk. Childs asks hard questions about how we live in places where the element we most depend on is unreliable, and how we might learn to listen to landscapes whose generosity is intermittent, precarious and sometimes overwhelming in its intensity. More people die from drowning than dehydration in the desert, he warns.

The west can be an unforgiving teacher. But it is full of subtle, life‑saving knowledge if you are willing to slow down and learn.

South: Chocolat by Joanne Harris

I read few enough novels that their stories stay with me for decades. When I first encountered Joanne Harris’ delicious prose, I was enraptured. Chocolat arrived in my life as I was struggling to find my way out of the strictures of a coercive, controlling community towards the freedom of being wholly in my own body. It was precisely the story I needed to chart a new course.

Chocolat takes place in Lansquenet‑sous‑Tannes, a fictional village somewhere between Toulouse and Bordeaux, set in a sun-drenched landscape of rivers, vineyards and tiled roofs, where the air seems permanently scented with sugar and woodsmoke. Vianne, the story’s wandering heroine, arrives in the village on the first day of Lent with a box of recipes. She opens a chocolaterie directly opposite the church, offering handmade truffles and hot chocolate at the very moment the parish priest is calling his flock to fasting and self‑denial.

The conflict that follows is as much about direction as doctrine: between a cold, rigid, north‑wind religion and a warm, south‑facing generosity of appetite. Read through the lens of the compass, Chocolat is a tale about what it means to turn towards heat, sweetness and embodiment after a lifetime of exile. South here is not just a position on the map, but a way of being that is sensuous and open, willing to risk pleasure in the face of disapproval.

South is the direction of the body. A place of taste and hunger. A place to decide to stay and open the door to the warmth of sunlight.

Your compass reading list

Including Harris’ novel alongside the creative non-fiction of Shepherd, Cocker and Childs reminds me that directions are emotional as much as physical and geographical. Sometimes the landscapes that shape us are the market squares and shopfronts of our imaginations, rather than mountains, fields and deserts.

These four books are not a definitive map of north, east, south and west. They are more like markers placed along the way, indicating that something over the horizon is worth exploring.

If you have some time this weekend, I’d love to hear what’s on your bookshelves that speaks to the rich symbolism and associations of north, south, east and west. You may find that one of these directions already dominates your reading list.

The wider invitation is to welcome the idea that the four directions are not compass points, but stories.

Let a new narrative unsettle your sense of what north, east, south and west mean. And, as you reach the final pages, you might just find a whole new direction to explore.

East is air, south is fire, west is water, north is earth.

In modern earth-centred spiritualities, including the druid path I walk, this alignment of elements and directions is passed on as an established universal truth. Sunrise and spring in the east, summer heat blazing in the southern sky, autumn sunsets over the western sea, winter darkness and cold stone in the north.

I inherited this elemental compass without ever being told that it had been made and remade countless times. It took me a long time to realise that the symbolic system I had accepted as fact was, in reality, something else entirely.

It was an invitation to orient the patterns of my soul to the shape of my world.

The roots of the compass

The principle of aligning elements and compass points has deep origins in European history. The ancient Greeks gave us the most enduring fourfold division of reality: earth, air, fire and water. These are the basic elemental roots, refined by later philosophers into combinations of qualities, hot and cold, wet and dry.

Around the same time, early science named the four great winds. Boreas from the north, Zephyros from the west, Notos from the south, Euros from the east. Each had a distinct character and came bearing prosperity or disaster on their wings.

For a long time these were parallel systems. Elements explained how things were made, winds explained how the world moved. In later alchemical practice and the tangle of Hermetic, Gnostic and magical writings, we start to see them braided together, with elements, directions and cosmic forces sharing a single map.

Medieval and early modern magicians tightened the correspondences. Grimoire writers and ceremonial orders inherited the old philosophical elements and married them to the four quarters of ritual space. The horizon became a living circle, with each direction linked not only to elements, but to angels, spirits, zodiac signs, colours, tools, animals, temperaments and hours of the day.

By the 19th and 20th centuries, occult revivalists and esoteric enthusiasts had turned these correspondences into a working liturgy. They cast a circle, turned to each quarter, and called on the spirits of air in the east, fire in the south, water in the west, earth in the north. They stood in ritual inside a carefully articulated symbolic cosmos.

That’s the elemental compass I inherited. It is a guide to a territory that is elegant and satisfying, and one that is filtered through unmistakably peculiar British imaginations.

But beyond the shores of these wet and windy islands, the compass breaks. Go far enough away to the southern hemisphere, to a landlocked plateau, to a desert interior, even to a Mediterranean shore, and the neat patterns rapidly unravel. Heat is in the north. Winter is a time of rainy abundance. Storms drive in over unfamiliar horizons. The wet edge of the world is in another direction entirely.

The compass rose of the soul’s chart doesn’t match the one printed in books.

Aligning my soul

As I step onto a sandy beach facing the Irish Sea, I too feel the tension between the elemental compass I’ve inherited and the terrain I inhabit.

Here on the Fylde coast of Lancashire, the map etched in my bones is not the one I learned in the back of a ceremonial magic textbook. North is where the weather comes from, an atmospheric river of gusting winds and migrating wings. East is fields, hills and valleys, the slow work of soil, roots and mountains. South holds the warmth and light I yearn for all year. West is the long, breathing body of water that shimmers with the glory of sunset.

This, then, is how I orient the geography of my soul.

North

Driving north, the land dissolves into the surrounding water until all that remains is the vast expanse of sky. Lying only a few metres above sea level, the northern edge of the coastal plane gives way to freely flowing light. Titanic clouds gather and dissipate, thick curtains of rain move across the bay, and when the wind comes from the north, it is unbroken by trees and hills.

The north is the place of air.

In the traditional arrangement of elements and directions, the air of the east brings enlightenment on the soft gentle breeze of dawn. But the air of the north rushes with unfettered urgency, driving in heavy gusts that sweep stars from the sky and set windows rattling. Turning to the north for inspiration is bracing. Ideas tumble and turn like wheeling herring gulls, calling out for attention in the howling tempest.

At night, the northern sky is home to the great bear and little bear. They circle the celestial pole, never dipping below the horizon line. I look north for steady guidance, knowing the oncoming storm will blow away the ephemeral and leave clarity in its wake.

East

The ground beneath my feet used to be submerged peat beds, brackish creeks and rabbit warrens. Only the concrete edge of the sea defences stops this land being inundated by the tide. Reclaimed and drained, it offers an uneasy solidity.

But if I look away from the sea, rolling fields eventually give way to gentle hills. In the distance, the horizon is made jagged by the peaks of England’s rocky spine. Travel eastwards from here, and the shifting edge of sand and salt marsh becomes a distant memory. To travel east is to encounter the certainty of earth.

This is the place to feel the ground beneath my feet. Deep valleys carved by moorland streams nurture ancient woodlands of oak and beech trees. I am nestled in the grooves and runnels of the rich earth, and whatever storms sweep from the north, I can crouch low and let them race overhead as they tousle the treetops. I stand on hilltops and feel the safety of billions of years beneath me.

When I crave the grounding of earth, I turn to the east.

South

Beyond Blackpool’s boundary line, a wide sandy beach stretches out. Backed by towering sand dunes, the enormity of this place is revealed twice daily by the retreating tide. The south I walk is expansive, warm and welcoming.

The south has always spoken to me of the longings of summer days when the sun rides high in the sky. But I’ve learned to love the south in winter, too. As the earth tilts on its axis, Orion moves in the darkness. I wait for his return, year on year, and greet him at his zenith. Always in pursuit, always pursued, his celestial hunt continues without ceasing.

Yet perhaps it’s the inconstancy of summer that draws me southwards. In the darkness of winter, I yearn for the spacious daylight, but when it arrives with the clearest blue skies, it slips through my fingers like a warm breeze.

The south is the place of fire, for certain, but it requires careful tending to keep the flame steady.

West

When I was looking for somewhere to settle, I briefly toyed with the eastern coast. But when fate intervened and reminded me there was another shore, I gladly followed.

I am an evening child, born just after the winter sun dipped below the horizon. Sunsets illuminate my soul in a way that the clarity of sunrise can never surpass. If I have a natural home at any point of the compass, it is in the west.

The west for me is intimately bounded by water.

In my years of wandering, I briefly overwintered in a rubble built tower at the westernmost point of mainland Wales. Entirely alone, I overlooked the stormy sea, shrouded in fog and kept company by woodlice and oystercatchers. I was enraptured by the deep magic of the west.

At the edge of the land, I can go no further without getting my feet wet. I know that there are other places beyond the unreachable horizon, but looking out across the water, I see only the golden paths laid down by the setting sun. The western shore is a thin place where past and future meet, and ancestors and descendants dance together on the soft sand of the fragile present.

Engaging with the directions

An authentic, soulful relationship with the world is always rooted in the reality of what is, not the expectation of what should be.

So, rather than handing you yet another fixed table of correspondences, I hope that by sharing my own elemental compass, I can encourage you to follow in the footsteps of the ancient philosophers and magicians.

Do the work they did. Read your world and let it teach you.

Stand where you are, whether on a windswept coast, in the shadow of a tower block, beside a river or under a mountain. Ask yourself: Where does the weather come from? Where does the light feel strongest? Where is your wet edge, your root‑deep ground, your breath of open sky?

A broken compass sets an unreliable course. But I trust you can find your way - north, south, east or west - on a path that is faithful to the living land beneath your feet and the inner landscape that answers to it.

Some days, the world feels flat. Pavements and paths become surfaces to cross as quickly as we can. We move from door to door, task to task, as though everything in between is dead space.

A flat, functional world might be efficient, but it doesn’t sustain my soul. So, I write Pilgrimagic to trouble our collective assumptions about the in between. I hope my words reach into the places you inhabit and offer not just images and ideas to ponder, but small, workable ways of paying attention, wherever and however you move.

This article is the beginning of a new rhythm for Pilgrimagic: a collection of prompts and practices at the end of each month, gathering up the past weeks’ preoccupations into things you can try for yourself. This month’s prompts and practices are an invitation to walk and wheel and sit in a world that is already full of other lives: paths with preferences, weather with opinions, beings that watch you pass and remember your face. This month, I want to offer experiments in animism and agency, with ways of behaving as though everything around you might be awake in its own way.

This article has prompts for those of you who want to write and think your way into these ideas, who find that language and reflection help you notice more or make sense of what’s shifting. And I’m also suggesting practices for those of you who are drawn to change how you move through your days, who want to feel these questions in your muscles and breath and daily routes, not only in your head.

You might lean more towards one or the other, or you might choose both: writing and moving, thinking and experimenting, letting ideas and practice speak to each other as you go.

And if you can’t walk far (or at all), you’re still invited. Movement here includes the smallest shifts of attention and posture you can manage.

Prompts and practices

Think of these prompts and practices as invitations rather than instructions. You don’t have to believe that stones, swans and stairwells are people in order to experiment with treating them as neighbours. You only have to be willing to let your attention soften, to offer a greeting, to notice how your body and imagination respond when you shift from walking through a landscape to walking among relations.

Take what’s useful, ignore what isn’t, and feel free to adapt everything to your own circumstances. The point is not to write beautiful essays or do the practices perfectly. It’s to see what happens when you let the world around you have more say in how you move, notice and choose. If you can, select at least one prompt and one practice this week and treat them as experiments in being alive.

The village square

Prompt
If you greeted your walking route tomorrow as a village square already full of more-than-human neighbours, how might your behaviour and attention change?

Practice: Three quiet introductions

• Choose a short route or a single viewpoint (a street corner, balcony, bus stop, doorway or bench).

• Look down, out and up. Pick one neighbour at ground level, one at mid‑level, one at sky‑level, for example, a puddle, a window, a pigeon on a ridgeline.

• Silently introduce yourself to each by name. Share one thing you are carrying today, pausing for three slow breaths with each.

• Notice any small changes in your posture, breathing or pace as you acknowledge them as neighbours.

Paths as persons

Prompt
Think of a path you walk often. If it could speak, what would it say it has learned about your longing, your hesitation, your pace?

Practice: Path memory scan

• Take a short stretch along a familiar route.

• Move more slowly than usual and look for three signs that this path remembers movement. Notice worn patches, footprints, tyre marks and leaning plants.

• At each sign, pause or slow and imagine one story about who might have made that mark and why.

• End by acknowledging the path as an archive of many beings’ choices, including your own.

The land as guide

Prompt
If the ground under your feet today were a trusted guide, what single piece of advice would it offer about your current season of life?

Practice: The small fork

• Find one tiny choice point: which side of the street, which set of steps, which spot at the bus stop?

• Pause and ask, “Where are you taking me today?”

• Let a small tilt of your body or a spontaneous glance choose the direction and follow it.

• Notice how it feels to let the route decide this one detail with you, then offer a brief thanks when you stop.

Everyday objects as companions

Prompt
Choose one non‑human being you encounter often, whether a tree, starling, bus stop or drain. If it is a person, not a thing, what kind of person is it?

Practice: Companion for the journey

• Select a single companion that journeys across the landscape, for example, a particular cloud, stream or hedge.

• As you move and rest with it, occasionally update it on how you are.

• At the end, ask it one question about your day or a situation you’re in, then pay attention for a minute to any answer‑shaped thought, sensation or image that arises.

• Note briefly how having a non‑human companion changed your sense of being alone or accompanied.

Weather, desire and choice

Prompt
Imagine that everything you meet today is awake in its own way. How might that awareness alter one specific choice you need to make this week?

Practice: Weather as conversation

• Spend a few minutes noticing one aspect of the weather interacting with you: light, darkness, temperature, breeze, stillness, damp or dryness.

• Treat a single sensation (sun on your hands, draught on your cheek, heaviness of air) as the weather speaking.

• Translate it into a short sentence of advice for today (for example, “Go gently,” “Take more space,” “Pause more often”).

• Let that sentence shape one small, concrete choice you make in the next few hours, however it moves you.

Endnote: Looking back

When I look back over the articles I’ve written during February, what strikes me most is that I haven’t really been writing about walking at all. I’ve been writing about relationship.

On the surface, Pilgrimagic is full of roads and paths, routes and maps, questions of how we move through the world. But under that, again and again, I find the same urgent question: what happens when we stop treating the world as scenery, and start approaching it as community?

In one direction, that has meant paying attention to paths as if they were people. Not just lines on the ground, but characters with dispositions and habits, with a long memory for footsteps and tyre tracks. I keep circling this idea that paths are not just made by walking, but they make us who we are. The paths I love, the paths I avoid, the paths I walk without thinking, each of them quietly edits my days, choreographs my choices, shapes what I can imagine. Desire paths are such a sharp illustration of this mutual making. The official route and the unofficial track, planning and longing in conversation, mind and heart moving to resolve their differences.

In another direction, I’ve been following a thread about the land itself as a guide. Under tarmac and gravel there are earthier suggestions. I feel the line of a ridge, the fold of a valley, the pull of water and the simple fact that it is easier to move here and harder there. Even in the urban environment I inhabit, the land speaks through slopes, drains, pavement cracks and patches of sunlight. I keep coming back to that invitation to follow the land instead of marching across it, paying attention to the contours of place and circumstance, walking with rather than over. This has become a way of thinking about life as well as walking. Less about forcing straight lines, more about learning to read the ground I’m actually on.

Threaded through all of this is the animist hunch that everything is alive. I easily recognise the agency and personality of my dog. I respect the lives of oaks and crows, ocean waves and storm clouds. But what about paving slabs, lamp posts, bus stops and kerb edges? Over and over, I find myself asking what changes when I behave as though these are neighbours rather than objects. What happens when I introduce myself to the street I live on, or say thank you to the earth that has held me up all day, or listen to what the wind on my cheek might be telling me? The more I walk this way, the less willing I am to treat the world as an inanimate backdrop that can only ever be picturesque or plunderable.

From an animist perspective, etiquette matters. If the world is full of other beings, walking is always a social practice and never a solitary one. The questions shift: How do I announce my arrival? Who was here before me? Do I have permission to be here? What might it mean to offer something back? The practices I’m sketching, like small greetings, tiny offerings and choices made in consultation with place, are all attempts to learn better manners in a crowded, more‑than‑human neighbourhood.

Desire is never far away either. Desire for freedom of movement, for safety, for belonging. Desire that shows up in the little rebellions of our feet or wheels: the rounded corner, the trodden shortcut, the way we drift toward or away from certain places without entirely knowing why. I’m interested in how those inner desire paths interact with the outer paths available to us. Where do they align? Where do they clash? Whose desires get paved and signposted, and whose are worn in quietly, almost invisibly, over time?

And above all, there is a concern for who gets to walk, and how. I hold onto the conviction that the magic of being in the world must be available in many forms: on foot, in a wheelchair, with a stick or from a window. After all, if paths and places are persons, then they are already in relationship with people whose bodies and lives look very different from mine. Wandering that only includes strong, fast, pain‑free bodies is not a journey I’m interested in.

Looking back this month, I see a map of relationships: paths as collaborators, land as teacher, objects as companions, desire as cartographer. I see a slowly unfolding attempt to live as though we are always walking among relatives, both human and more‑than‑human. Pilgrimagic, at its heart, is my attempt to learn how to be a better guest in their company, and to invite you to experiment with that, too, one small step, wheel‑turn or breath at a time.

If you try any of these prompts and practices, I’d love to hear what happens. Notice what shifts, what resists, what surprises you.

And if you’re willing, share a moment or two in the comments so we can keep learning how to be guests, neighbours and relatives together. Every small story helps trace another desire path away from flat, functional walking and towards a world that is alive.

The sand dune climb towards a pine-fringed crescent bay. The tunnel of dark trees opening on a flower-filled meadow. The mountain summit’s vista across an endless horizon.

Spectacular paths through jaw-dropping landscapes intend to wow and seduce. Moments of breathless anticipation, transcendent joy and the warm afterglow of aching limbs and flushed cheeks.

But I sometimes wonder whether these paths are trying a little too hard to impress. Like an overeager young lover who appears on their first date with flowers, a bottle of wine and a declaration of undying love, it’s all too much, too soon.

“Breathe,” I whisper to the path, as it pushes to its heady climax. “There’s no rush. We can take this slowly.”

Love can be found in grand, sweeping, romantic gestures. But the love that transforms, nurtures and sustains us, the love that wraps us in comfort on a cold February day, is a love that arrives gently.

I have walked so many paths, more than I remember. But the paths that stay with me are the ones that loved me quietly, tenderly, and without pretence. These are the paths that met my weary feet with kindness, the paths that encouraged me to rest, the paths that led me home.

Like a partner reaching to take my hand when I needed reassurance, these are the paths that created a space for me to move through the world without the expectation of performance. Just a simple knowing that, in this next step, I am more than enough.

These are the paths I love.

In last Saturday’s article, I explored the animacy of paths. I introduced the idea that the ways we travel attract us, remember decisions, edit choices and choreograph movement.

But living paths are far from the only beings we share the world with. Whether we meet trees, rivers or rocks, the places we walk are alive.

Three contemporary thinkers can help orient us to the reality of moving through a complex community of interconnected, animate beings. Anthropologist Nurit Bird‑David shares the lives of South Indian forest‑dwellers and their more-than-human kin. Scholar Graham Harvey provokes us with an animist manifesto. Emma Restall Orr, philosopher and poet, introduces a new metaphysics of the wakeful world.

Together, they sketch a way of being with life itself, and they offer us some practical invitations for animist adventures.

Animist perspectives

Nurit Bird‑David begins not with grand philosophy but simple observations of the everyday life of the Nayaka, a small foraging community in South India. As an anthropologist, she spent many years working with South Indian forest peoples, later revisiting her field notes for her book, Us, Relatives.

For the Nayaka, Bird-David observed, wherever there were people, there were also devaru, superpersons who might be hills, stones, elephants, or the presences that show up in trance dances.

Bird‑David noticed two things. First, Nayaka personhood is relational. A person is anyone we share food, space and stories with. Second, devaru are not invisible souls hiding in things. They appear in relationships and events: a stone that jumps into someone’s lap while they’re digging roots, an elephant that walks gently between houses at night and meets a human gaze. In those moments of mutual responsiveness, the Nayaka recognise a person.

Animism is best understood not as a philosophy of being but as a relational way of knowing.

British religious studies scholar Graham Harvey opens his Animist Manifesto with a punchier claim: “All that exists lives. All that lives is worthy of respect.”

If we take his manifesto seriously, he suggests, we should probably stop talking about objects and resources and start talking about persons. Other‑than‑human persons, other‑than‑oak persons, even other‑than‑rock persons.

Harvey is interested in the etiquette of animism. How do we approach, listen to and sometimes eat these other persons? Respect, he writes, is “taking care of, caring for, caring about, being careful about”, and it’s always worked out in relationship. You don’t have to like someone to respect them. You might even eat them, if you’ve negotiated it properly.

Emma Restall Orr goes deeper into the philosophical thicket. I was once privileged to spend a mind-expanding afternoon with her on a druid retreat, and her writing at the intersection of spirituality, ethics and philosophy is always thought-provoking. In her book, The Wakeful World, she argues that nature has inherent value because it is comprehensively minded.

The world, she proposes, is not a pile of dead stuff with consciousness accidentally glued on. Everything in nature has an inner life and awareness. She tracks Western arguments about the separation of mind and matter, then offers animism as an integrated metaphysics. Thinking and being, she proposes, are inseparable aspects of one living reality.

In Restall Orr’s universe, an animist is someone who lives “within a self‑aware cosmos full of engaging subjects”, and who seeks to align their ethics with this wakeful nature.

Though these writers have three distinct perspectives - ethnographic, activist and metaphysical - they converge on a simple idea. The world is a community of more‑than‑human persons, and how we behave among them matters.

So how do we start to live as if that’s true?

Practice one: Educate your attention

In Bird‑David’s observations of the Nayaka, they did not sit around debating theories of the soul. They learned, over a lifetime, how to notice what was happening between themselves and others. Stones, elephants, hills and weather all became devaru when they entered into social, responsive relationships.

You can borrow this as a quiet practice. Choose a place or being you regularly meet, like a particular tree on your morning walk, a bend in the river, or a patch of waste ground where nettles and dock leaves negotiate an uneasy truce.

Visit attentively and often. Notice what is changing in them and what shifts in you, like colours, sounds, your mood, the quality of your attention.

Track moments of mutual responsiveness. Notice when the jackdaw stares at you intently as you watch it, or when a sudden gust of wind interrupts your thoughts at exactly the right time. Don’t rush to explain. Just acknowledge that something happened between you.

Bird‑David calls this educating the attention rather than collecting beliefs. Consider it an apprenticeship in noticing relatedness.

Practice two: Learn animist etiquette

Harvey’s manifesto is full of small reminders that respect is practical. If you truly hold that all that exists is alive and worthy of respect, you will find yourself behaving differently.

As you walk through the world, experiment with animist manners. Speak to other beings as persons, not things. Acknowledge the tree as your neighbour. Greet the crow that crosses your path as you would any human. Notice what shifts in you when you alter your approach.

If you feel drawn to a feather, a shell or a handful of wild garlic, pause. Ask (silently is fine), “may I?” See what your body says in reply. If you take it, offer something, like your attention, breath or simply a promise to use it well.

Harvey warns against hugging trees you don’t know without introduction. A smile, a name, a first conversation: for the slow-growing oak, relationships evolve over time.

Practice three: Walk wakefully

Restall Orr is interested in the stories that underpin our habits and beliefs. For several hundred years, many of us in the West were taught that only humans have real minds, and that everything else is a mechanism. What would happen if we no longer believed that?

Her animist metaphysics lends itself to a gentle but radical experiment. As you step outside, try this thought: “Everything I meet today is awake.” It may not necessarily be aware like you are, but what if every being you encounter is capable of experience, response and significance?

Let this guide small choices. If the world is wakeful, how do you park your car? How do you prune a hedge? How do you throw things away, knowing there is no “away” that is not someone else’s home?

It's OK to feel silly, sentimental or irrational. Your reactions are evidence of your training in materialism, not proof that the world is inert.

Restall Orr doesn’t ask you to blindly agree to a new set of beliefs, but just to see what becomes of your ethics when you assume that you are always surrounded by other beings of value.

Practical animism

My animism has been shaped by my experiences of being with the world, as much as it has by reading, writing and thinking. I spent much of my life feeling lonely; animism allowed me to see that I was never alone. I am privileged to count the magpie, the beech tree and the ocean wave as teachers, companions and friends.

But I believe there is a lot to learn from other humans, too. Bird‑David gives me a way of paying attention to relatedness. Harvey gives me a language of persons and respect. Restall Orr gives me a reason to trust that all of this isn’t an anthropomorphic fantasy but a profound and coherent way of understanding reality.

I offer all of these ideas as invitations to approach the world in a new way. You don’t have to settle the metaphysics of animism before you start walking differently.

The next time you step out of your door, imagine yourself entering a village square rather than an empty stage. Everyone is already here: starlings and dirt tracks, beech trees and plastic bottles, crocuses and storm clouds. You are just another person among them, minding your manners, learning the local customs and discovering who wants to talk with you.

On some unremarkable afternoon, you might realise that the way you inhabit the world has changed. Less lonely wanderer, more beloved neighbour. Less detached observer, more engaged participant in a wakeful, relational, more‑than‑human conversation.

Somewhere on an ordinary path between a litter-decorated hedge and a half‑blocked drain, animism stops being a philosophical concept and starts to feel like the only way to be with the world.

Long before a single footprint presses into mud, geology, water and plantlife all quietly dictate what kinds of paths are even possible.

Bedrock and movements of ancient ice establish the foundations. Ridges run high and dry while valleys collect water and silt. Old river terraces hang like shelves above floodplains. It is along these sorts of features that paths so often thread: the narrow hilltop spine that stays firm in winter, the flat ground extending around a cliff, the shoulder of a hill that keeps us just above the bog.

Even if nobody has walked them yet, the land has already suggested paths.

Forces of nature

Water takes those suggestions and scores them more deeply. Rain runs where gravity and texture allow. Rivulets, rills and rivers all make their own way down the mountain.

In the river valley, floodwaters come and go, leaving behind bars of gravel and edges of firm sand. Human and more-than-human wanderers learn to move along these ready‑made tracks laid by storms and seasons.

Wind, fire and ice are path makers too. Wind scours dunes and headlands, stripping loose grains from exposed crests and leaving compressed, walkable tracks. Fire clears undergrowth in streaks and patches. In cold places, freeze and thaw heave stones upward and sort them into stripes. Between the stony ribs are softer bands of finer earth. Seen from above, it is a pattern; felt underfoot, it is a subtle invitation.

Growing from the landscape, plants and trees refine the broad brush strokes of potential movement. Dense brambles, thorn thickets and head‑high reeds all say no. Their refusals funnel movement into the natural corridors they leave as breathing space.

Trees work more intimately. On eroded slopes and stream banks, roots surface as twisted ribs. They knit together soil in some spots, leaving adjacent strips less bound and more ready to be worn into shallow runnels. Feet, hooves and paws find purchase between them, and the earth compresses into treads.

Path makers

We can't help but respond to the intimate urgings of geography.

Our desire paths, unofficial shortcuts scoring parks, campuses and housing estates, appear the moment a formal route fails to match how we actually want to move. Someone cuts the corner, walking across the grass instead of following the paving’s right angles. Another person sees the faint track and follows. Soon the soil compacts, the grass thins, rain runs off a little faster, and a narrow brown stripe of bare earth announces itself.

What’s striking is how quickly a desire path becomes self‑reinforcing. A line that is even slightly easier underfoot or clearer to the eye draws more walkers. Each footstep makes it more inviting. At some point, the desire path feels more natural than the formal one. Later, planners may come along and lay tarmac or gravel along that improvised route. Officially, they are making a new path, but in reality, they are acknowledging the collective decisions of countless footsteps.

We may be unique in our ability to concretise our communal movement, and so many of our ways across the world silence the land rather than listening to it. But we are not the only path makers.

A solitary foraging ant stumbles on food and, on the way home, she lays down a thin trace of pheromone. Other ants, wandering nearby, detect that trail and follow it. If the route leads somewhere good, traffic increases. With each trip, more pheromone is laid, and the line strengthens. In time, it becomes the colony’s main highway. In heavy traffic, ants can even self‑organise into lanes, with outgoing and returning individuals sorting themselves into efficient patterns.

Across species, the pattern repeats. Voles create narrow runways through a meadow, linking nests, food and cover by running the same lines until the stems of grass permanently lean away. Elephants inherit and enlarge ancestral corridors between waterholes and feeding grounds, trampling bush into broad, hard earth tracks that other animals later adopt. Deep‑sea urchins graze across abyssal mud, leaving looping, linear feeding trails that reshape nutrient patterns on the seafloor.

Even the sad, repetitive pacing tracks of zoo enclosures testify to the desire to follow a trail. Constrained movement creates a path of hunger and distress, but it speaks of the deeper longing of all beings to roam free.

The work of paths

A path appears where landforms, roots, water and feet meet and negotiate. The path is not made by any one of them; it is the shape of many encounters. But once that shape is there, the path itself begins to act.

The first thing a path does is attract. A barely visible flattening in grass, a lighter streak of soil or a faint line on snow is enough. We are unconsciously pulled toward the path. Here is a line that has already solved a problem: how to get from stile to gate, from forest edge to river, without stumbling through tussocks or thorns. To step onto it is to trust that decisions made by others will carry us. The path invites us to join its thinking.

In doing so, the path remembers. Paths tell us where feet have walked, where hooves have found water, where paws have slipped safely through the brambles. Paths store collective risk assessments: this way offers firm ground, that way was washed out in the storm. When we follow a path, we are reading its memories written on the earth.

As they attract and remember, paths also edit. Look at a hillside long enough and you can imagine an infinity of possible routes. Then you notice the single pale line that actually snakes across the landscape. Somehow, out of all the options, that one has survived the tests of gradient, weather, undergrowth and habit. The path is a ruthless editor, cutting vast paragraphs of possibility down to a single intelligible sentence. Many ideas have been proposed by feet, but the path decides what makes the final draft.

And paths choreograph movement. Crowd experiments and everyday observation show how quickly we fall into lanes, sort ourselves, and follow the curves of a path even when the ground beside it is equally flat. Paths coordinate these flows so that strangers move together as though they were taking part in a rehearsed dance.

A path deciding is not a flight of poetic fancy. It is a practical reality brought into being through the animacy and agency of the path itself.

The animate path

“Where are you taking me?”

It is a good question to ask of any path, and not only if I am lost. To step onto a path is to rely on its ability to hold the collective wisdom of countless beings over endless time. If I can let go of my lonely urge to decide everything, as if mine were the only choices that mattered, I can collaborate with the attracting, remembering, editing and choreographing work of the path.

“I know how steep is too steep,” the path whispers to me. “I know how wet is too wet. I know where you will begin to ache and where you will begin to sing. I know where you might stumble, where you can stop to look, and where you will break into a run.”

If I walk with the intention to be present, I notice that the path’s mind is spread out along its length, in the distribution of its wear, in the way it widens in some places and narrows in others, in the fork that gradually prefers one way over the other. Its memory is held in the density of its soil, in the way certain stones are polished smooth by bootsoles and turning wheels, and in how twisted roots become exposed as a reminder to slow down and pay attention.

I hanker to be going, but the path longs even more for my footsteps. It is a restless line, adjusting itself under my feet, whispering suggestions, listening for where water wants to fall and roots want to hold.

And sometimes, if I pay attention, the path decides not to go home after all. It tugs me instead around a blind corner, across hills I must climb without knowing what’s on the other side. And in that moment, a real adventure begins.

I still believe that the path is made by walking. But I wonder now if the truth is more complex, because the path makes me in return by inviting me to walk with it. Perhaps the only real work is to trust its memory and let it lead me.

Because after all, “who wants to know a story’s end, or where a road will go?”

This essay is inspired by Sheenagh Pugh’s poem, “What if this road”. Listen to it now, read by Susan Wokoma.

When I was sixteen, I decided that I was not going to be beaten by the circumstances of my life. I would keep going, no matter what.

My determination may have saved my life.

But what started as an act of desperate self-preservation turned into something even darker and more dangerous than the pain I was escaping. Perseverance stained my soul with unwept tears and, over the years, it metamorphosed into bloody-minded stubbornness. As I forced myself on, the soreness of my weary legs became a measure of my courage, my devotion, even my worth.

I am so grateful that, eventually, life brought me to a crashing halt. Refusing to rest was hurting me and the people I loved. In the enforced stillness of my lowest place, I could finally stop running from dangers that had long since dissipated.

I learned that if I was quiet enough, a healing path emerged from the earth beneath my feet. It beckoned me to consider not how far I could go, but how authentically present I could be in every footstep.

I learned to shift from achievement to attention, from conquest to relationship. And when I walked this way, I stepped into something wiser and wilder: a world that is alive, responsive and full of magic.

The gentle holding of a shady oak, the rushing whisper of a retreating tide, the sun illuminating delicate strands of moss. And in all of these encounters, the deep knowing that everything in the landscape is listening quietly and waiting to speak.

Moments, not miles. Not the destination, but the encounters along the way.

I found, at last, the gentler paths of intuition, connection and ritual.

Listening to others

For many years, I struggled to trust my decisions, and my intuition terrified me.

In truth, intuition comes not from a quiet inner voice, but from an attitude of listening. It’s the unspoken sense that a path is opening or closing, or that a turn to the left feels right, even if the map says otherwise. It’s the body’s way of knowing before the mind has caught up.

Intuition is the sound of many voices.

In an animist understanding, the world is not silent. Every tree, river, bird, stone and storm has its own way of speaking. They talk, they listen and they respond. Their collective voices shape the story of life.

When I walk with intuition, I am not only following my own inner compass. I am tuning into the subtle signals of the more‑than‑human world: the flight of a magpie just as I hesitate, the warmth of the sun on a patch of earth, the feeling that a certain place is wooing me to linger.

Intuition isn’t about forcing my inner promptings onto the outer landscape, but about my willingness to stop and listen. Whenever I follow a hunch, turn down a side path or pause where something calls, I am engaging in an act of co‑creation. I relinquish self-determined control and join a conversation.

And in that conversation, I can trust that the world is full of answers. I only need to listen.

Connecting with kin

The concept of nature connection presupposes a separation, as if nature were a distinct, passive thing beyond us.

The path of connection invites me to see the more‑than‑human world as full of persons. The twisted pine with its slow life. The river that carves its own course. The stone that has weathered centuries. These beings are not objects, but subjects. They act, they grow, they resist, they invite. They have their own stories, their own souls.

When I walk with this awareness, nature connection becomes a recognition of kinship. I am not a visitor in a landscape, but a member of a community. I meet a tree not as scenery, but as a relative. I walk beside a stream not as a resource, but as a companion.

Carrying this sense of kinship, my path is not over the landscape, but deeper into it. I offer my attention and respect. In return, the world offers me its presence and welcome.

I am not separate from nature; I am part of everything.

Making the ordinary sacred

I learned long ago that I could not live in a universe without mystery. Faced with the wonder of all that is, words so often fail me. Expressing those things that are beyond human language requires the grammar of ritual.

Ritual is poetry made flesh. In ritual, worlds turn in the simplest of intentional gestures. Ritual is a powerful way of making the ordinary sacred, of marking thresholds and of sensing intentions for the way ahead.

In an animist frame, ritual is not a solo endeavour but a collaboration. When I climb over a stile, I don’t just step from one field to another; I cross a threshold into liminal space. When I leave a stone or speak a blessing, I am not just doing something for my own benefit; I am acknowledging the magic that energises places and beings.

My agency is exercised in how I shape a ritual: what I say, what I do, what I offer. The world’s agency is seen in how it responds, in shifts of mood, in surprising stillness or movement, in encounters that feel like a reply. Ritual is not a performance on the world’s stage, but a celebratory communal dance of giving and receiving.

On the path of ritual, I pause more often than I press on. I make a gesture that honours the living world, and I turn every ordinary step into a sacred act.

Treading the threefold path

The paths of intuition, connection and ritual are so deeply intertwined with one another that I wonder if they are indistinguishable.

A moment of intuition, like a hunch to turn left, becomes a moment of connection when I find a tree that seems to be waiting. Our meeting becomes a moment of ritual when I touch the bark, speak a word or simply stand in stillness. In that singular moment, I am listening, relating and making sacred.

This is the heart of “moments, not miles”. The threefold path I follow is not about how far I go, but about the quality of attention, relationship and reciprocity I find in each step. It is about walking in a world that is alive, responsive and full of magic, and about discovering my role as a participant in that world.

When I walk the path of intuition, I listen to nature’s voices and respond with my own. When I walk the path of connection, I rest in the kinship of the more‑than‑human community and act with care and reciprocity. When I walk the path of ritual, I make the ordinary sacred and co‑create meaning with the animate world.

The year ahead

Looking in horror at the hourly onslaught of news, I can only assume that some humans are determined that 2026 should be as confusing, divisive and disorienting as possible. In that context, making a commitment to the threefold path of intuition, connection and ritual feels like an act of resistance.

If it is, so be it. My dream for 2026 is to walk a path of attention, relationship and reciprocity with the animate world.

In the year ahead, may all our paths be made by walking, moment by moment, in relationship with life itself.

Whether we’ve travelled together since January, or you are just joining me on the path of wonder and wellbeing, thank you for your company.

Paths intersect, and for the briefest time, we walk side by side.

If we travel together, I may be lucky enough to glimpse the world through your eyes. We might talk about whatever catches our attention. Though our footsteps follow each other, our visions diverge. We are at once on the same path and on entirely different journeys.

One of the things I love most about writing on Substack is that it makes me a reader, too. So I wanted to share four perspectives that I’ve enjoyed. All these writers are in my recommendations when you sign up for Pilgrimagic, and I warmly encourage you to subscribe to them, if you haven’t already.

I enjoyed walking alongside them this year. Here’s what they drew my attention to.

Working land

My vision of the world is framed by the agency of the more-than-human community. I see landscapes shaped by rivers and rain, inhabited by beings who co-create the world through their presence. Nature for me is complex, interconnected and non-hierarchical.

But I admit, I sometimes overlook the role of humans. Carrie Starbuck’s Field notes from the messy middle of nature recovery is a salient reminder that when humans get involved in the living world, they can make a positive difference.

Carrie works in the field of nature recovery, and her piece talks about wetlands, data, ambitious collaborations to revive endangered chalkland, and the reality of a job that is “hopeful in theory, exhausted in practice.”

There’s a tendency in some parts of the environmental movement to see human beings as a problem, with apocalyptic predictions of social collapse that cast humanity as a disease to be eradicated. In Carrie’s work, I read about something more hopeful: a “quiet revolution” that could change valleys with the slow return of water, or where farmers, ecologists and financiers gather around a table dream together about the future of land use.

Words on the tide

I spent some of my early life on the Suffolk coast, and I’d gaze out over the drab, grey, silty waters of the North Sea puzzled why people were so enchanted by oceans. Later in life, I’d discover cliffs, crashing waves and blue waters. But Hannah Booth’s writing about my childhood sea has given me a deep appreciation for its murky shallows.

Her article, Words of the wetlands, is an etymological treasure chest, exploring the history of descriptions for the watery edge: marsh, mire, fen, wash, level, sump, carr. Perhaps it’s the importance of things that lead us to name them. The richness of our vocabulary embeds centuries of wonder at the “watery realm between land and sea.”

Hannah traces how certain words moved through Germanic and Scandinavian languages, and how drained land still carries traces of water in its place names. Maps hold memories of lost water, and Hannah’s work is a reminder that landscapes speak through human language, as much as through the call of birds or the squelching of mud.

Maps as prompts

More on maps from Yasmin Chopin. I first encountered Yasmin through her overview of place writing. At a time when I was searching to understand the genre of work I was engaging in, her framing of place with words gave me a new vocabulary to track my thoughts.

Her article, Maps as prompts, offers a more interior way of seeing: using maps not just to find my way, but to open memories, stories and sensory details of place. Yasmin introduces the idea that maps can be prompts for writing about place. I concur. On my wall, I have a map of the Galician coast, and it directly inspired recollections of my own journey.

Exploring a map allows me to trace a route, circle through locations and let my eye wander. A map is not just a representation of the landscape; it is a mirror that invites a journey into my inner world.

Elemental attention

Finally, Jez Green’s Elemental learning brings my wandering into explicitly mystical territory.

Jez is a Manchester-based poet and storyteller, and his creative engagement with the urban landscape is always an inspiration. It’s easy to sense the vitality of the living world in wide open spaces, but like many nature-lovers, I can find cities stifling. But I’m inspired by his dedication to Pomona, an overlooked sliver of an island lying between the River Irwell and the Bridgewater Canal.

Jez’s poem moves through the seasons as questions, asking where the reader finds source, spark, breath and grounding. It’s a journey to the “sea of all knowing”, where fire stokes passion, air teaches play and earth supports flourishing. Poetry is good for the soul, and in a world stripped of rituals, this is a deep magic.

Ways of seeing

I’ve been inspired by the company of these fellow explorers, and I’m profoundly grateful for:

• Carrie’s committed and hopeful attention to the “messy middle” of fields and policies (The Nature of Things)

• Hannah’s attunement to the myths and history of the sea (North Sea Nexus)

• Yasmin’s commitment to nurturing writing that connects deeply (Home & Place Writing)

• Jez’s mythic questioning of what it means to be human in relationship with other beings (A Wild Green Heart).

I’d love to hear from you about other writers who have inspired you this year. Who changed your perspective, expanded your vision or shifted your gaze in an unexpected way? If you’re reading this in the Substack app, feel free to share links in the comments.

Right now, even an early evening walk is an adventure into the darkness. By the time my working day ends, the sun has already disappeared below the horizon. I put on my coat and gloves, bundle a reluctant dog into the car, and head out to our regular walking spot. We wander as the light fades from the sky.

By the time our walk is over, it’s only seven o’clock. It might as well be midnight.

In the stillness of these winter nights, time on earth moves strangely. Tea time feels like bed time. Without the shifting shadows of day to mark the passing hours, the undifferentiated darkness stretches out.

Though the world is quiet, I do not know when to sleep.

Stargazing

Above my head, silent and hidden behind scudding clouds, stars gently draw the arc of time’s passing. Across the incalculable distances of the expanding cosmos, their movement seems serene.

I know that stately procession of the stars is an illusion; it is the earth beneath my feet that is hurtling away from the moment of sunset and embarking on the great journey towards the dawn. I watch as constellations seem to rise above the horizon and sink again beyond sight. But I am moving. Not them. Even standing still, I rush through the emptiness of space.

To gaze at stars is to glimpse the deepest history of everything that is. The light waves reaching my eyes have been rippling across the universe for hundreds of years. The stars I depend on for direction and companionship could long since have burned themselves out, and I would never know.

On cold, clear winter nights, I am so grateful to have left the bright lights of the city behind. I remember in my thirties, staring up at the low orange clouds of a London night and wondering if I would ever see a dark sky again. Christmas decorations were a poor substitute for starry wonder.

I ventured out to find darkness. I chose my home in part because I could see the stars. I treasure the act of stepping out onto my back doorstep, and looking up to watch Orion rise above the rooftops. I stand for long enough in the cold that my eyes adjust, and with every passing moment, more lights appear.

Nightwalking

Moonless nights are best for stargazing, but they make walking difficult. Far beyond the illumination of towns and cities, the darkest hours can become unnavigable. I have walked in woods so shadowed and deep I could not see my hand in front of my face. New moon movement is necessarily slow.

Yet under the light of a full moon, the world is transformed. Sometimes, there seems to be enough reflected sunlight that colour returns to the earth. I sense deep blues, purples and greens in the shadows. The colours of night flash from the blackness like the jewel tones of a magpie’s tailfeather.

Or perhaps my eyes play tricks on me. I have found, from experience, it is best to walk with a torch in my pocket and to only use it in an emergency. A red light torch is best, as it protects my eyes from the sharp adjustment of white light. Night sight is precious, and hard won.

It can be scary to walk in darkness, though it needn’t be. In the UK, at least, the more-than-human community is gentle; I am not potential prey to any animal predator. Humans, however, sometimes terrify me. I am cautious and wary, and I know there is safety in numbers. But I will not let fear rob me of the magic of darkness. I reclaim the night.

Approaching midwinter

The nights are growing longer, and soon my morning walks will be night walks too. Approaching the heart of midwinter, it is all too easy to become confined indoors. But the darkness beckons me, even if only to step into the garden and gaze at the stars.

Shadows tap at the window, inviting me out to play. Silvery moonlight makes trails across the land, summoning me to follow. Stars glimmer from the windswept skies.

Even in the rush towards the celebrations of midwinter, I find myself slowing down. I am grateful for gentle companionship of the moon and stars. Sometimes, I wish these dark nights would last forever.

Being with a dog has changed the way I walk. Before Mera, I’d wander for hours or barely venture out at all. Walking happened at exactly the right moment, and I enjoyed the freedom to move as the universe urged me.

Walking with a dog enforces the discipline of a schedule. Morning and evening, we are outside together whatever the weather.

Compared to the anxious and uncertain rescue dog who was bundled into my arms five months ago, Mera is transformed. She has grown in confidence walking on a lead. She greets other dogs and humans. She sniffs with endless curiosity. But a key to her security is the familiarity of knowing exactly where she is going, so we walk the same stretch of Blackpool prom twice a day.

We park near the Mirror Ball and head south to Starr Gate, where we look out over the wide beach and towering sand dunes. Across the sea, on a clear day, the mountains of north Wales breach the horizon. We gaze for a while into the distance, and we return.

The sea and the weather are constant companions. At high tide and in high winds, spray clatters onto the concrete walkway like shards of glass. But at low tide on a still day, we can slip down the stairway that winds towards the beach. These are the mornings we live for.

In the dawn light, treasure hunters swing metal detectors through the tide pools on the sand. Turnstones and oystercatchers flock to feed, and take to the air as we approach. Clinging to the hexagonal breakers of the sea wall, saw wrack glistens, still wet with the memory of the falling tide.

We have space to explore here as we amble across the soft ground. Mera runs, jumps and barks. I stare at the distant horizon. The concrete lines of the sea defences stand rigid and unyielding, but here on the beach, every morning is filled with the possibility of change.

Time is fleeting. This magical place will disappear again beneath the next incoming tide. Today’s beach will be washed away, while tomorrow’s beach is still the dream of waves and shifting sand. But we will be back, and perhaps the crow will be here again to greet us.

Time was against me this week. I longed to enjoy some timeless moments, but it has felt like there aren’t enough hours in the day.

Sunlit hours are dissolving into the shadows of wintry nights. Our dog Mera is anxious about venturing out after dark, so there are extra daytime walks to schedule. And, as of a month ago, I’m working full-time.

My new job - managing marketing and brand development for the UK’s largest relationship counselling service, Relate - is exciting and rewarding. But by the time my working day ends, it is dark outside. Once chores, tea and baths are done, there are precious few moments left before sleep demands my presence in the world of dreams.

Ironically, this week I had planned to write about time. I didn’t quite manage to weave my thoughts together, but here are some of the inspirations and provocations I gathered with an array of perspectives on time itself.

If you have a moment this weekend, these are good things to explore.

Natural rhythms

Daylight saving does nothing except shift our reference point by 60 minutes. Clocks changing in autumn may bring nightfall an hour sooner, yet no time is lost. We simply recalibrate.

But as Rachelle Wilson Tollemar points out in her insightful article for The Conversation, our twice-yearly argument about clocks misses the wider point that winter rest is an essential element of nature’s balance.

“We are the only species that chooses to fight against our biological presets,” she writes, “regularly changing our clocks, miserably dragging ourselves into and out of bed at unnatural hours.”

I have often wondered how it would be to live perpetually governed by the movement of sun. Though I’m not a morning person, I have had a handful of midsummer days wandering from sunrise to sunset. Hours stretch endlessly. Compared to the enclosing of winter, time becomes generous and luxurious.

This week, I have felt Tollemar’s call to embrace the rhythm of life deep in my soul. If only I had the time.

Dissolving reality

But perhaps time isn’t the rigid taskmaster I imagine it to be.

I first read Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time during my years of wandering. Without a permanent home or regular work, I had the freedom to slip sideways out of time, unshackled from the constraints of calendars and clocks. I lost track of days. And in truth, I sometimes lost track of reality. Life beyond time can be disorienting.

Physics and poetry are pursuits of the truth of things, and The Order of Time is the remarkable product of Rovelli’s reality-revealing wordsmithery. From his unique vantage point as a physicist with the heart of a poet, he explores how the essential nature of time is not as orderly as we might have believed.

Whenever I step over the threshold of a labyrinth, I sense myself slipping into a realm when time moves differently. Time loops and whirls, flows forward and back, pools languidly and rushes like water from a breached dam. Sometimes, it does not flow at all, but jumps from moment to moment. These various sensings of time are not only in my imagination. I am grasping something of the reality of time’s becoming.

“The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention…” writes Rovelli. “In the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.”

Rovelli’s work is not for the faint-hearted. His writing is accessible and illuminating, but his subject matter is profoundly disconcerting. Read the book with your feet firmly on the ground, and listen for the rising and falling of your breath. Even as the imagined march of time dissolves into silence, your heart somehow keeps beating.

Naming time

If you want something altogether lighter and more grounding, I recommend this video exploring the etymology of words related to time.

In it, I found out that hours and years share a common ancestor. I learned about the sennight, a word that we’ve collectively dismissed in favour of the more prosaic week. And I stumbled on a word we should definitely revive. Why do we talk about the day after tomorrow when the enchanting overmorrow languishes in a dusty corner with the dictionary’s obsolete words?

If you enjoy a gentle stroll through the world of words, I think you’ll appreciate this.

Until next time.

But perhaps we shouldn’t believe everything we’re told.

In ancient times, as today, the labyrinth’s path was simple and unbroken. The myth’s supposed hero was a callous young man in search of glory at any cost. And his victim, hidden away from sight in a sanctuary, was not the monstrous minotaur, but a divine wild child, born of his mother’s devotion to her gods and named after his beloved grandfather, Asterion.

Stripped of its bloodied mythology, the labyrinth becomes a place of potent magic. It offers a journey of transformation, not terror. Of curiosity, not conquest.

The labyrinth invites us to put down our swords and shields, to let go of our impulses to attack or defend, and simply let things be what they are. In the labyrinth, we tread an ancient path of ritual transformation. We journey to its centre not to meet a monster, but to find ourselves.

Crossing the threshold

There is a narrowing that marks the labyrinth’s entrance. The continuous sweep of the outer edge turns inward to border the path that leads towards the centre. Approaching, I am beckoned by this sinuous, sensuous geometry.

With no line in the sand to step over, the exact moment of threshold-crossing is unclear. But as I inch forward, I sense my choices shifting. A few footsteps ago, I could have turned away. Now, I can only turn back.

Yet a labyrinth has no true inside or outside. The boundary line that guided me to the threshold was only the furthest edge of the winding path. Untwist a labyrinth, bend and reshape its form, and it is simply a single line through space carrying me from one place to another.

So how does the labyrinth enfold me in its magic? I believe the labyrinth is not made in the drawing of lines or the building of walls. It emerges in the animate power of the path itself. The way through the labyrinth is alive with its own intentions and agency. I go wherever it takes me.

The path leads; I simply follow.

But I am not trapped. All the time, I have choices. The space between one stretch of path and its neighbour is not a wall, but an emptiness in the field of labyrinth’s form. I can step across. The path is not a constraint, but an invitation to a deeper freedom.

There is nothing to stop me ignoring the path entirely and walking directly to the centre. Instead, I choose to trust the labyrinth’s wisdom. Every turn offers a shift in perspective. My first steps take me so close to the centre, but then cast me out to the farthest reaches. My urge to take the most direct route is confounded by the path’s paradoxical winding.

The longest unturning section of the path tracks the labyrinth’s outer edge. Yet just as my feet will carry me no further, I journey inward.

Standing in starlight

The centre of the labyrinth is simply the end of the path. I can go no further. There is no way forward but back.

For the starry-eyed child, Asterion, alone in his labyrinth, this dead end was home. With no memory of a world beyond the threshold, all he saw beyond this still point was shadow. Twisting corridors. Darkness. Even though he longed for his mother’s tenderness and the kindness of companions, I can sense why he stayed here.

There was safety in his solitude. This quiet sanctuary was his whole world.

His presence lingers here. As I pause and gaze upwards at the starry sky, Asterion plays in the shadows. Eager for company, he invites the vulnerable, wounded, abandoned selves I carry quietly in my soul to play with him.

The scared, the sacred; this is their place, too.

The walk to the centre of the labyrinth is a journey of personal reconciliation. Passing through the shifting threshold and travelling through the liminal space, the path’s gentle unwinding readies me. At last, I welcome those parts of myself, wild and divine, that were lost to chaos and compromise. In Asterion’s home, I return to myself, in all my complexity and wholeness.

I am safe in the sanctuary of starlight.

Enchanting the everyday

The centre of the labyrinth may be Asterion’s home, but it is not my own. Eventually, I sense it is time to return.

To the medieval mind, a labyrinth was a microcosmic pilgrimage. Contemporary pilgrims may hop on a plane from their final destination, but for countless generations before, the slow retreading of the pilgrim’s return was an essential opportunity to reflect and integrate their experiences. A homeward-bound pilgrim was changed by their walking.

So it is with the labyrinth. The path may not turn back, but I do. From this point on, I am walking in the echo of my own footsteps. Often, I find, the walk from the centre is more powerful than my initial steps. Opening myself to the possibilities of the centre’s stillness gives me a renewed vision that I carry with me as I journey home.

Eventually, I reach the place where the path once again widens, and I sense the transition back into the everyday. I have a choice. Will I forget? Or will I remember?

I choose to carry the spirit of the labyrinth with me. Every step I take beyond the winding path can be filled with wonder and the rich possibilities of encounter. Even if my labyrinth dissolves with the incoming tide, the footsteps I have taken make tracks across my heart.

Enchanting the everyday requires a shift in perspective, and it can be hard to hold on to the insight that labyrinth walking brings. I think this is OK. Whether I walk a public labyrinth, draw a shape on the sand or trace the lines of the labyrinth’s path with my finger, this journey is always open to me.

But I’ve learned that the transformative potential of the labyrinth persists long after my walk is done. Encountering the mystery at its heart expands my capacity to see the world through starry eyes.

And the physical act of walking the path creates a new story of sanctuary, wholeness and the wonder of a divine wild child.