Saunter Trail
Nature’s path to wellness
There is a particular freedom in walking at a leisurely pace, free, at least for now, of needing to be somewhere. Sometimes the mind turns to a question; sometimes the simple senses of the moment are quite enough. The word saunter carries something of both. It means to walk at leisure, but has an older, less certain meaning, too: to muse, to be absorbed in thought.
Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher and naturalist whose writings on conscience and civil disobedience later influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., explored this deeper purpose of walking in his essay Walking. He imagined the saunter as a kind of pilgrimage, a journey toward something sacred. John Muir, the naturalist, explorer, writer, and influential conservationist often called the father of the national parks, captured the feeling of arriving nowhere in particular and finding yourself exactly where you ought to be. In the wilderness, he wrote, wherever he happened to be seemed, at that moment, “of all places the best.”
People have explored these sorts of experiences through a variety of approaches. Wilderness awareness sharpens the senses and deepens our understanding of the living world and how it works. Forest bathing encourages a slower, more attentive experience of the forest, taking in its sights, sounds, scents, and atmosphere. Nature therapy draws on the relationship between people and the natural world in support of well-being. Walking meditation brings attention to the act of walking itself, while spiritual traditions offer their own ways of exploring reflection, wonder, and connection. As best I understand them, the approaches differ, though some bear similarities. They bring to mind a metaphor by Tom Brown Jr.: a broom, with bristles of different kinds attached to a common handle.
The Saunter Trail brings some of these approaches into the woods through audio reflections for a self-guided experience contributed by practitioners. The recordings offer visitors a few different ways to experience the trail, depending on what interests them.