How using your Soles can feed your Soul

"A life spent between the seat of a chair and the seat of a car is a monkey’s life, not a man’s. When you think in a seated posture you think with your rump, not with your soul…

But the real point about walking is that it isolates you in the midst of the Cosmos. It liberates you from the necessity of isolating yourself by a terrific effort of the mind.

Your whole nature can now be receptive and at peace. You can see things and people, life and death, in a large, free, easy, atmospheric perspective. You can, of course, escape from your home in your car; but your car itself is a mechanical contrivance imposed between you and Nature... The mere physical process of walking: this putting of one leg in front of the other, this treading on the pavement, on the road, on the grass, is itself an engenderer of wise and gentle thoughts. A person cannot be too conscious of his body as he walks: of the actual sensation of movement as he stretches his legs.  By treading upon her with alternate feet you enter into a subtle and intimate relation with your mother, the earth. It is as if the earth in her deep planetary masochism got pleasure from being trodden upon, just as she does from being ploughed up.

You should feel, as you walk, something of the exultant pride with which our remote, anthropoid ancestors first stumbled across the astonished earth. You should revert to the old childish glory in being able to move at all in this upright manner. And in the mere process of walking a thousand mysterious understandings spring up between you and the earth which cannot reach you, though you steer your car ever so cleverly, while you are sitting above. In the process of actually touching the earth you realize what an escape from everything that hurts you worst in the world the Inanimate is..."

John Cowper Powys 

 extract from 

The Philosophy of Solitude