Virginia Woolf has been on my mind lately, along with the other woman walkers featured in Kerri Andrews’ Wanderers (mentioned in my 2022 book review). Whenever I walk alone, their stories and voices appear at points along the way. Today would have been Virginia Woolf’s 141st Birthday, a good day to share one of my everyday walks and this process of walking-writing-connecting.
It is handy to have a few everyday walks in your pocket; ones which don’t require planning or many things, and can be easily fitted into fuller days. One of my new regular walks sets out along the canal, along Offa’s Dyke for a wee spin, through some fabulous fields with views across Chirk and beyond before weaving back through some woodland (or the other way round). It takes me just over an hour. These shorter, familiar walks where I don’t have to think about where I’m going open up new ways of thinking. There is something pattern-forming about the regular re-tracing of one’s steps.
“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.” ― Virginia Woolf, The Waves
I start out along the Froncysyllte canal. Layers of nature, heritage, transport, homes and people blur into my meandering, curious thoughts. Drawn to the boat dwellers, I search for sensory clues about who lives on them; boat-top gardens, music from an open window. The names: Blue Angel, Knot Again, Pekara. Woodsmoke drifts from small flues of waterborne universes. I plot various ways to make new friends who live on canal boats.
Walking alone brings internal worlds out into the open. Virginia Woolf was known for walking in London, and loved urban walking (often at night). She wrote of the manyfold joys of slipping out alone, of “no need to hurry, no need to sparkle, no need to be anybody but oneself”. Round here, the canal, village streets and the A5 are about as urban as it gets for a few miles. I imagine what Virginia would have made of this place, and what the internal landscapes of the people I pass are like.
It’s over the bridge now, and onto Offa’s Dyke; the path which runs pretty much along the whole English-Welsh border. The whole route takes around two weeks to walk in one go, which I can imagine to be a fascinating mediation on borders and counties. Returning to live in Wales, my English half looks the other way over the border once again. Deborah Bird-Rose wrote of Indigenous Australia, and the Aboriginal approach to boundaries. The dominant cultural approach in the West is that boundaries exist for exclusion and self-sufficient. The Aboriginals believe that boundaries “exist to connect difference, and facilitate interdependence”1. Bird-Rose suggests that this philosophy sustains relationship. I try to breathe this permeability into my own body and cells.
Up through the fields now, where there are some beautiful lone oak trees. From here I can see the border itself, just beyond Chirk aqueduct. Virginia wrote that “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” The land itself is seamless, embellished on the surface with fences, roads and walls, but beneath that an entangled, living, beating whole. I imagine Virginia is sitting against one of these towering oaks (as I do) in quiet reflection, sadness or joy.
Back to the Wanderers book, one of the things I enjoyed was how Kerri Andrews had selected women who wrote. Several of the accounts reference the way stories and ideas can write themselves while the writer walks. I love this idea of embodied narratives arising from our connection with the elements as we travel on foot (or perhaps by wheelchair); moving through space whilst language swirls into our consciousness and enters our bodies as nourishment. Virginia felt this bodily exchange as she walked, then wrote.
“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
From the fields I hop a fence into the woods. All I take on this short walk is a small zippy bag which fits over one shoulder; just big enough to hold a smartphone, emergency cereal bar and a head torch if it’s late in the day. Today I’ve managed to fit a folded bag in there to gather some kindling on the way home. There is an earthly abundance of sticks. I thank the trees for their gifts.
Each bundle contains worlds and ecosystems; bright lichens on bark sing out from the depths of winter. My walk with Virginia is almost over, and I resolve to add more of her books2 to a never-ending forest of a reading list. The snippets I have read of hers keep resonating as her gifts and walks live on. Virginia walked her own path, guided not by ego, but an unbounded will to be herself.
“I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
It is so very, very sad that Virginia Woolf took her own life at the age of just 59. We would hope that today there is enough awareness about mental health for this not to happen - and yet it still happens, despite the wellness benefits of things like walking. For some people the boundary between life and death is more porous; sometimes in interesting spiritual ways, sometimes in too intimate a relationship with melancholy. It’s that fine line between walking with sadness and death as friends, or letting them navigate.
I am learning a lot about grief work at the moment. What does it mean to walk with those who have passed over, as well as those who are still amongst the living? We need more than walking to be well, but it can at least take us a fair way towards a sustainable (if still at times fragile) state of being.
Our own lives and wanderings weave threads into the fabric of collective consciousness, which are meaningful and memorable to our human and more-than-human kin. I wish you love and connection on this Tuesday. Perhaps you’ll join me in wishing Virginia a happy birthday, as the kindling catches and I light a fire for her.
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Dialogue with Place: Toward an Ecological Body Author(s): Deborah Bird Rose. Journal of Narrative Theory , Fall, 2002, Vol. 32.
Books by Virginia Woolf to read: The Waves, Orlando, A Writer’s Diary
I really like these images, Em. Especially Kindling. Beautiful.
Thank you Emily - I love this! So thoughtful, so inspiring. So you!