When I go on walks, I almost always take my phone with me now.
Not because I have so many people to talk to, but so that I can talk to myself.
Unless I've fooled myself somehow (not actually that hard to do), my phone's availability is not as much for media-tetheredness as it is about capturing some of the many thoughts that flow more freely through my mind when I'm out walking (not to mention the sights involved — like the red flash of a cardinal darting across the path in front of me). The words those thoughts generate sift and sort as they inch me towards the sensations I’m feeling physically (pain, pleasure, etc.) and the emotions I have been carrying around psychologically.
And then, there is the whole spiritual dimension that seems conspicuously more accessible in the context of the often harmonious dynamics of nature (and, according to Richard Louv, apparently I'm not the only one impacted in such ways). Although nature certainly includes disruption of that harmony, the more consistent experience, at least as I have observed it, seems to be the interplay between everything that appears to be living and breathing together in many contexts like the woods or the ocean or even the skies. I have developed an affection of spirituality, after an extended relationship with it through the lens of religion. Religion seems to often leave you either with a drum-beat to perpetuate itself, or the urge to get as far away from it as possible. Spirituality, on the other hand, seems far less interested in co-opting and moralizing and controlling (even systematizing) things. It just is. It serves both itself and the co-inhabitants of its environment, and perhaps even something greater than mere affective activation (why, for example, would it include so much beauty if it’s all just a personal function?).
Sidebar: All of us, after all, are only partially on to truth. If that feels disputable, what actually is the alternative? That we understand all truths? That certain people understand all truth? If we acknowledge that the body of truth is ultimately not fully known by anyone, wouldn’t that leave us with a slightly different disposition towards our relationship with what we think is true? The reality is, among other things, this makes us far more vulnerable than we prefer to be. Because which part of what is true am I actually after all acquainted with? And, what if someone else’s partial relationship with the body of what is true has awareness of parts of it that are different from what I am familiar with about it?
So, spirituality has become something, for me, that transcends some of the more limited contexts of my experiences with truth. There is belief (what you think is true), and there is faith (what you are really trusting in). And, there is religion (among other things, what tries to aggregate and socialize). Then, there is spirituality against which they all seem to lay or, at least, tap into.
Walking then (as confirmed here) — the physical act in a context like nature — awakens my awareness to some of these realities (both within myself and externally...all that is going on around me). And, words are one way I can engage with all these dynamics.
I have noticed that my attempts at verbal-framing are pretty ephemeral. Thoughts fly in often unannounced and then promptly proceed to evaporate (kind of like that cardinal). If I don't jot something down as it happens, too often I can only remember that I thought about something that seemed significant, but not what it actually was. And, so, my phone (or, should I say from a functional perspective, my recording device...which also happens to be a phone) is a handy and helpful way for me to capture conversation with myself about this engagement I have with life and the world.
Wait, hold up...I'm making a note, as I merge my technology with the sublime.
