Both a memoir and a work of nature writing, Shattuck’s prose flows effortlessly, and you will find yourself reading the whole book in perhaps two or three sittings. He encounters characters that will seem familiar to us as he traverses the landscape in Wellfleet and Truro, and even finds his way to Commercial Street in Provincetown. The book Six walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau begins with Shattuck walking on Cape Cod after a recent break-up, lost and heartbroken, but fully self-aware. Writer Ben Shattuck took Thoreau’s Cape Cod writings as a jumping off point for his own walking meditation, a project that had him on foot on the Outer Cape, up in Mount Ktahdin and Mount Wachusett, and in the woods of Maine. And of course, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote about his epic journeys on foot including those undertaken right here on Cape Cod. (She did live 9 more years after that… just sayin’). Buddhist spiritual leader Thich Nhat Han said “When we take mindful steps on the earth, our body and mind unite, and we unite with the earth.” Filmmaker Werner Herzog once walked from Munich to Paris to see his dying friend and mentor film historian Lotte Eisner, in the belief that the walk itself could somehow cure her. People engage in walking meditations or for other spiritually guided reasons. His writings, from Civil Disobedience to Walden, remain popular because of their enduring relevance, and Walking bears a special resonance for modern readers who may have become disconnected from the natural world.Walking has long been used as more than just a means of getting from place to place. Americans felt the pressures of a changing world even in the relatively slow-paced 1800s, and Thoreau proposed balancing social stress with unhurried wanderings in fields and woods. Thoreau's view of walking in nature as a self-reflective activity invites readers to embark on their own ramble in order to gain a 'wild and dusky' self-knowledge unattainable elsewhere. The impassioned essay, which praises the merits of time spent in nature, has become one of the most influential works of the modern environmentalist movement.

'For I believe that climate does thus react on man - as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires.' Henry David Thoreau's Walking began as a lecture in 1851 and ultimately appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862, shortly after the author's death.

Walking david thoreau