When I was young, I apprenticed as a cabinet maker in Hartland, North Devon. One weekend, I noticed something about the walkers.
The majority had a goal, a plan, a destination. They had to get from point A to point B and, usually, by a specific time, so they rushed through the landscape, focused on some future endpoint.
This memory reminded me of a BBC television documentary I had watched in 1985 called The Hunting Party. Over ten days, two teams had to cross 100 miles of tough bushland in Australia’s Northern Territory to reach their destination.
The SAS team approached the challenge like a brutal forced march, maintaining a straight line from A to B and relying mainly on rations. They won, crossing the finish line on day eight.
The Aboriginal team, however, turned down the false urgency of a race. They took their time, moving through the landscape and living off the land. On the final day, they were still miles from the finish line.
I remember the presenter, who travelled with the Aboriginal team, asking one of them, ‘We’re not going to get to the finish line?’ The Aboriginal men laughed and said, ‘No, we’re not.’
The reporter, confused, asked, ‘But why did you not want to win?’
One of them turned to him and said, ‘Mate, we know we could have done it, but really – look around you, look where you are. We’re sitting here relaxing, the stars above us, this beautiful landscape surrounding us, and we’re all together in community. We don’t need to prove to you white folk that we can get to the destination. We know we could, but is that the most important thing?’ They prioritised the fire, food and being with each other over a clock.
Too often our walks in nature follow a route. We start here, we end there, and we cover ground. Today I’m going to discuss sauntering, which is very different and has no destination. Instead, it simply follows attention.
Thoreau described it as a sauntering of the eye. You let your gaze drift like mist, landing where it feels drawn. Pause to absorb what catches your attention, then move on slowly.
Sauntering is a quality of receptive, unhurried noticing with no agenda. You simply place yourself in a part of the landscape and move, opening up your vision and your feelings and following what I like to call the tug.
I’m pulled in one direction, and in the early days, my mind would kick off like a demented monkey, eager for answers.
‘What am I doing here?’, ‘What is that bird?’, ‘This is pointless’, ‘I am bored’, ‘I’ve got an appointment later today’, and so on.
When this inner dialogue happens, we do not reprimand ourselves. Instead, we cradle the confusion, hold it gently, and let it do its thing.
Meanwhile, we bring our awareness back to our body and continue to follow the tug. Your body is very good at this if you let it.
If you walk slowly and attentively, you’ll find yourself pausing by something before you even know why. Maybe something caught you: a shape, a scent, a patch of colour, a sound. There’s no active decision to stop. You just find yourself stopping.
I trust the tug, not due to anything metaphysical, but from experience. Many, including myself, have found that our senses react quicker than our thoughts. They notice more than our conscious minds can register.
I see that pause as information: something has registered in your body that your thinking mind hasn’t processed yet. When we pause, we stay. We look at what drew us and let the body lead the inquiry rather than the mind.
This is a very deep practice. It sounds simple, and when you read the words, it is. But when you actually do the practice, you realise pretty quickly how much you live in the cage of your cranium.
Some people think the Domei practices are not profound enough. Those are the people who have only read the practices and not done them.
Those who do them realise just how deep this work is. Sauntering is not a preliminary to the real work. It’s not a warm-up. The sauntering, the tug, and the pause – this is one of the practices.
Following what draws you is not indulgence. It is a form of attention and it’s one of the oldest forms, the one the body already knows and always knew.
Domei helps you stop letting your reasoning mind overshadow your real experiences. This mind often keeps you distant, making you feel like an outsider looking in.
Instead, we move from examining the world as a single point to beholding it, so the whole landscape washes over us.
Domei immerses us in the living world, and over time, little by little, like Alice, you enter Wonderland.