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  • Serendipity
  • Liza Field (bio)

Walking to work and back, I find things. Unexpected, gift-like treasures I had not set out to seek.

An evening sunlight turns into gold fire some old weeds poking up through the snow. A strange cobalt-blue glows out of the mountains, calling one to climb. An aqua-green cracks open the far sky, through hammered-gold and purple clouds, like the rose window of a cathedral. A joy floods through my veins and I feel I might be walking through Paradise.

Covering the same route by car, I see nothing but traffic, red lights, the ever-changing gas-prices. No inspiration cracks open my thoughts, just an anxious haste to fly over the gap from point A to B. When I walk, that gap between points opens up like Alice's rabbit hole. The "way there" is no longer a flat, annoying stretch to jump across as quickly as possible but a deep place in its own right—alive with treasures to be found by anyone on-foot.

Recently I read from Horace Walpole's Three Princes of Serendip, heroes who kept finding things they weren't looking for on their way elsewhere. From this tale we get the word "serendipity," the "faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident."

Such a description could sum up foot-travel in general—and the human journey of all epic stories. Like John Bunyan's hero Pilgrim, we aim for a certain destination but meanwhile find the way strewn with rich lessons, like one long, bumpy, inconvenient University corridor—until it becomes unclear whether graduation from this endeavor was really the point of it all.

When I arrive at school on foot, pull the stocking cap off my messy hair, and blow my red nose frankly in a bandanna, colleagues and students stare at me in kind wonder, confounded by my unacademic routine. It's hard [End Page 49] to explain, in a building, that the outdoors can offer insights on briers and birds, water and light, education and why-we're-in-school.

"I want yall to walk," I tell my English students, assigning them essays on-foot. "Turn off the headphones; don't take the iPod. Quit listening to dead stuff everybody's already thought, and look out for something new!"

In those outdoor essays student writing comes to life—more vivid, original, and funny than their indoor work. Mainly, students get to see that the point of school is not just to receive an A and get out of there; indeed, they see that a free education at the Universe-ity is all around us, waiting for a person to walk through and notice.

Aristotle, whose "peripatetic school" scuffed about on-foot, asking questions and learning from plants and stars, apparently found a wealth of knowledge to be plumbed walking the land, as did many great thinkers and saints through the ages.

Something about a walk under the sky opens us to the splendor of life. Maybe it's why most biblical scenes occur outdoors among people on foot. Those who sit around inside seem to be in a bad mood, plotting Jesus's death, wanting John-the-Baptist's head on a plate.

The rest of the scriptures seem to aim for outside exertion, "setting the captive free," tromping forty years through a desert, climbing a mountain to pray, following a cloud by day and fire by night. Even God seems fond of an evening stroll, enjoying the garden and wondering why Adam's hiding out.

Passing our mountain rhododendrons, gleaming with winter sun, I think about how Moses, on foot, was able to notice the burning bush. Had he not turned back and stared, there might have been no Exodus, no freedom, no walk out of Egypt. But Moses saw this amazing thing, stopped, and pulled off his shoes in reverence, realizing that he was "standing on holy ground."

Walking through hedges and old-folks'-homes, graveyards and gardens, I sometimes think all ground is holy. Feet on the dirt and head in the sky, I can feel a juncture between heaven and earth that speaks of the Christmas message.

The...

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