Thousand Mile Walk Home

After being sidelined by injury, professor Michael P. Branch vowed his year would be filled with 1000 miles walked. As he logged his miles, the emphasis became one of practice, like a monk's meditations, and opened his eyes in a profound way: "[The miles] were all walked here, in the high desert, on public lands, within a ten-mile radius of my home. If my bioregionalist experiment of walking more than a thousand local miles each year has involved weed whackers and beer and skipping as well as pronghorn and golden eagles and the wordless beauty of moonlight gleaming on unbroken snowfields, that may be just as well. It is incremental work, but I have had a glimpse of how these walks might someday add up to a journey, in the same way that a life is comprised only of individual days, which are themselves nothing more than a series of moments in which we choose to take a small step, or do not."

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