First Footprints

Why walk? Why Walk In Peace?  First footprint: ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help. So I step back onto familiar ground: What do I know? I know there is war. I know we are suffering. Far and near. As far as the people I have never met—but blood is blood, the worlds I have never entered—but tears are tears, the depths I have never plunged—but loss is loss; as near as the person I call me, the life I inhabit, the battlefields within. My home, my hearth, my heart.  

Why walk? Why Walk In Peace? I don’t know what to do. And I must do something. So I go to Auschwitz/Birkenau. I walk on a soil of suffering. Unfathomable staggering suffering. I am not alone as I walk. There are many who choose to walk this ground, to meet the not-knowing. Witness and bear. With the Zen Peacemakers, with the citizens of the earth, converging from all compass points of humankind, we walk. November 2012, 67 years after The War. The War ended—but war did not. A culture of war fills its shoes. Leaves endless footprints. In our homes, our hearths, our hearts.

Why walk? Why Walk In Peace? I don’t know what to do about guns becoming our third arm—or is it first, and terrorism being the loudest voice, and rage having the last word—or is it rape, and girls being sold into sexual slavery, and eyes empty because we can’t share—or won’t, and hate erecting walls between us—or is it fear. Walls and fences and gates, lines and labels and locks. Different, deviant, diseased, dirty. Untouchable. Them. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do about Them. But which Them? I look in the mirror. I don’t know what to do about Us. 

Why Walk In Peace? I return from Auschwitz. But I can’t return. I can’t return the same ol’ person taking the same ol’ steps. I need to walk some new steps. No—I need to step differently. Intentionally.

Why walk? I’ve walked for years. Almost half a century. (Funny story is: I crawled till I was two; there were fears I would never walk. And then one day I stood—and ran.) I walk because I like the feel of movement. I live with chronic pain. Walking stirs up the inner landscape, gets the ions a-bopping so it feels less like pain…and more like life. When I walk, I feel alive. I walk because I like to meet my ground intimately. Nothing between us. And I walk because I like to experience the ‘along the way’s. From here to there. I don’t want to miss the middles. I walk whenever I can. Wherever I can. It’s a slower way of getting around, for sure. But I can feel myself wearing my steps, feel the steps of a lifetime on these feet. I can say it was me who took them. I stepped through my life. So it’s no surprise that I walk. It’s the natural thing for me to do.  

Why Walk In Peace? Why walk at all? I don’t know what to do about the wars that spread across the globe like the deadliest of plagues. I don’t know what to do about the wars that seed our hearts. ‘I don’t know’ runs deep, deep as the ground I walk on. But I know how to walk. Put one foot in front of the other and point my steps forward.

Will you join me?