Like most, I am enriched by words. Writing them, reading them, listening to and endlessly speaking them. Words arrive as gifts, born out of my imagination or within the printed material piled up throughout our home. In Kerri Andrews’ book, Wanderers, she wrote, “On foot, Woolf walks out into the fields and into her mind.” The two activities, walking and writing, mesh for me as well. Virginia Woolf cements the idea in her May 11, 1920 diary entry, “Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before.” On my daily wandering, I think endlessly about the characters dancing about in my head, as vividly as I sort out real-life dilemmas that need the same attention to pacing. Walking connects us to all that swirls about before pen hits paper or brush slides over canvas or spice gets sprinkled into the dish. Walking journeys us along the path inside and out. Books do too.

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