Clippings

Muscle Memory

The concluding stanzas of What the Heart Cannot Forget by Joyce Sutphen. In a decidedly unpoetic way, the image reminds me of the way my body feels when someone helps me exercise long unused muscles.

And the skin remembers its scars, and the bone aches
where it was broken. The feet remember the dance,
and the arms remember lifting up the child.

The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away,
everything it lost and found again, and everyone
it loved, the heart cannot forget.

Eden Walk

There are two expeditions capturing my imagination right now—Ben Saunders and Tarka L’Herpiniere's quest to retrace Scott's journey to the South Pole and Paul Salopek's seven-year walk around the globe. In The New York Times, Salopek reflects on "bipedal journalism" and the lessons of his journey.

AND then there is simply the act of traveling through the world at three miles per hour — the speed at which we were biologically designed to move. There is something mesmerizing about this pace that I still can’t adequately describe.

Later in the day, I saw there messages in Salopek's Twitter stream—


Related

There's a remarkable similarity of feeling in Edward Huth's discovery after making the effort to learn to navigate with environmental clues—After a year of this endeavor, something dawned on me: the way I viewed the world had palpably changed. The sun looked different, as did the stars. While the ocean didn’t accommodate my “human” need for meaning, a different sense emerged from the wave patterns that conveyed the presence of winds, shoals, coastlines and distant storms.