Since our ancestors walked out of Africa to the far reaches of the planet, walking has been a part of our spiritual and artistic life. Yet what's left out of most vision quest narratives is the arduous trek from village to a place in the wilderness that echoes the numinous voice of the people.

Dakota Sioux scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. tells of how the earth holds in perpetuity the signs of a sacred site. "An important hallmark of the Indian experience with space, then, may be its material imprint on the earth marking the occasion."
Although place is "fixed" over time, one person's god is another person's illusion.

While he walked to Damascus, a vision of a living Christ stunned Saul of Tarsus. Taneda Santōka walked the roads of Japan, usually drunk, always writing haiku.
Filmmaker Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris, "in full faith, believing
(the dying film historian, Lotte Eisner) would stay alive if I came on foot."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau confessed that "my mind only works with my legs."
When physicist Werner Heisenberg visited his mentor, David Bohm, they walked and talked then could not agree on what had been said.

    Two persons riding surfboards are lifted by the ocean's high curling waves. I wonder why
    they don't stand up, then see they are two large birds fishing. Suddenly they are humans
    again, and I realize that the scrim between man and bird is a few high swells of the sea.

We ride horses, camels, mules...On a cloudy morning in a Southern California town motorized vehicles carry people over the damp streets. Where I walk rise the cloud-shrouded mountains whose painted rocks shamans could decipher, because they knew, "Mountains' walking is just like human walking."