Who We Are
Our names are Ed and Will, and we make journeys.
We make them round these British Islands, on foot, for as long as we can. We usually manage about 9 months, although shorter strolls happen too.
“Why?” people usually demand, and we sometimes ask ourselves the same.
For what can such experimentation achieve? Are we not just disengaging, cloud-like in a selfish dream? How can walking possibly be a valid act?
This is the question we try to answer.
Walking defines us. We are the upright strollers of the great monkey family. The perspectives opened by walking are the keys to our kind.
For the mind, soul and body, walking is an expansive act – it opens gates into the landscape, turning quick blurry images into smells, aches and wonders. It shows the hedgerows daily bubble toward glory, then fade to cold sleep. It lets you hear the birds, screaming the seasons. It welcomes you direct into the great event of life on these islands. There is no other qualification; just go out, and be on foot.
For today’s people, living in 21st century England, coming-of-age ceremonies are plastic and terrible. With our elders locked in overheated boxes, our children protected from everything, how then shall we grow? With whose help shall we learn our abilities and strengths, to know our land, and our place amongst everything?
We can initiate ourselves, with a journey for a guide. No niche skills are needed – the call is wide and the land is open. Personal boundaries, endured since birth, will adjust to new contexts. Who to be, and what to do, become the destination.
The journey gives encounters that can shake everything previously learned, meetings whose significance seems to echo through earliest memories. Walking allows fate to get closer.
This doesn’t mean it is easy, simply unfolding before you. Walking requires full immersion, observation in all directions, or you’ll get wet and take a bus home. The journey demands as much as it gives.
And this is the greatest trick we’ve learned about walking: Always carry something with you to give, and give it away as often as possible.
For us this was songs, which weigh little and rarely run out. Songs, like journeys, are strange entities with lives of their own. They are learned, adapted, and released with love, and into unknown ears they disappear, racing to their unfathomable destinies.
Singing is not the only way. We know also of walking spoon-makers, who carve and peddle their green-woodworking, and this seems to work too.
So find your gift, and let the journey be your apprenticeship and tutor. Your skills will surely blossom.
And each time you turn a corner, climb a hill, and meet someone, to deliver your gift, you will be forging an open path for those journeyfolk who come behind. A trail of understanding, reciprocity, knowledge and culture is created, just as it always has been.
And that’s why we go walking.
