Sky Walking

I have been to the end of the Earth.
I have been to the end of the waters.
I have been to the end of the sky.
I have been to the end of the mountains.
I have found none that are not my friends.

Navajo Proverb

The pandemic is at a tipping point. Tensions rise as we seek steps out of isolation and confinement. We crave connection. And yet, it feels like we’ve never been more divided. I’m deeply troubled by the rush to return to the old “normal”; I’m consumed by dark thoughts about the future. Who will we be when we emerge from this crisis? 

Walking is the best way I know to (literally) ground myself. And today I’ve decided to listen to a podcast from Emergence Magazine that offers a 45-minute sensory-focused walk experience, designed and narrated by Kimberly Ruffin, a certified nature and forest therapy guide. She introduces a sampling of six unique practices — different ways to engage with nature as a living presence and experience what she describes as “a continuous exchange of belonging.” This is exactly the kind of connection I need today.

Kimberly calls one of her practices Skywalker:

“The sky reaches all the way to the ground and at this very moment it is hovering over what connects you to the earth,” she says. With this exercise, Kimberly suggests that I “sense how it feels to be where the sky and earth meet.” Her gentle invitation captures my imagination.  

I’ve never thought of walking in sky before. Yet, we live and breathe in sky just as naturally as fish live and breathe in water.

Wow. I’ve been as unmindful as the fish in the joke who, when asked, “How’s the water?” replies, “What the hell is water?”

Or as naïve as the young child who only knows the sky as something up above her head, a ribbon of blue that borders the uppermost edge of the world. Separate and contained.

Forest therapy is sometimes referred to as forest bathing. So today, I don’t just walk in a pale blue sky dappled with milky clouds, I bathe in it.

Heavy with humidity and the scent of honeysuckle, Sky feels cool and slightly damp on my skin. Its weight shifts almost imperceptibly with every breeze; its movement stirs the fine hairs on my arms as they swing in rhythm. Sky flows underfoot as I step up, quickly yields to the force of my sandal coming back down to meet Earth. And Sky creates a cooling sensation as it rushes into my nostrils. Is it possible to taste the color blue? Breathing more deeply, I fill my lungs and my diaphragm. Sky is inside me—a living force—just as I am inside Sky.

“Fly the friendly skies of United.” The Western/European mindset claims that Sky belongs to the airlines, in the same way that the land and her resources belong to the highest bidder.

But what if that wasn’t the case? What if I—what if all of us, the two-leggeds and four-leggeds and all our relations—belong to one spacious, generous sky? Connected and boundless.

The pandemic demands that we pay attention to our place on this planet. We share the coronavirus because the world and its inhabitants draw breath from one sky. How would our individual and collective actions change if, like many indigenous groups, we understood that we belonged to the land and to the sky? Or if we learned to sky walk together?

“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing.“

Thich Nhat Hanh, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth

A Forest Walk, by Kimberly Ruffin: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/a-forest-walk/