Walking the World: On Freedom and Water in Flowing Movement

Walking the World: On Freedom and Water
in Flowing Movement
(click on photo to view its contemplative complement, WARNING!)

(1) In limit, there is freedom;
in freedom, there is limit.

Even the wildest of rivers
creates itself the boundaries
of the bed that order its flow.

(click on photo to view its contemplative complement, WARNING!)
	(1) In limit, there is freedom; in freedom, there is limit. Even the wildest of rivers creates itself the boundaries of the bed that order its flow.

(2) New meaning necessitates new form. After drinking from
the source of a hundred mountain streams, even the finest of wine
glasses may no longer suffice.

(3) The spring gives freely of its water, but
only in freedom can we drink.

(4) The simplest and most powerful of all possible freedoms
is the freedom to stop doing, regardless of the short-term
consequences and difficulties thus encountered, that which is
inherently contradictory or wrong.

(5) A free economy is a strictly limited one. Even the busiest
of thoroughfares still retains a thin white line, protecting the rights
of those of us who prefer to walk.

(Photo: Alpine Spring, Fall; Traditionally, in the mountains of Europe, springs and
small streams were frequently given wonderfully charming names which somehow articulated
their character or presence. This spring pictured here is called simply , <<Teiftalbach>>,
the name of the steep little valley were it has its source. It supplies year round remarkably
pure water for an entire village. One can easily imagine that, just as when one is on a trek,
the first thing the original settlers of high alpine valleys looked for was a bit of protected flat
ground and a source of good water. This is one of the joys of cross-country walking, to come
back in contact with these primal qualities which compose the natural landscape.)

The five miniatures above introduce Walking the World, a series of metaphysical essays which
explores the relationship between our thought or consciousness as a whole and how we think about
or perceive the natural world around us. The setting is the European Alps, where I've had
the opportunity to live for extended periods of time since 1982, and where many of the photographs
of this exposition were made. In the journal-like essays of Walking the World, I'm on a long
mountaineering trek from the historic central Gotthard area of the Alps, through much of the Cristallina,
on to the Monta Rosa, the great Cervino (the Matterhorn), and then south, to Gran Paradiso.

To see a map of the watersheds of this area, go to AstheRiverRunsMap

For the fall Picture/Poem Display, I've excerpted passages from Walking the World which I thought
might work nicely together with the selected images. If you would like to read one of the longer essays
in its expanded form, go to The Pause

Also, you might like to look at a related little thought-poem, DAM, from a series called WOODCUTS.

(Photo: Alpine Spring, Fall; Throughout the year, this water has a constant temperature of
about 6 degrees Celsius.(click on photo to view its contemplative complement, WARNING!))

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