Walking affords us unique opportunities to commune with the earthiness underfoot, to slow down and come into relational ecological presence. The significance of this shift in mode of being has been recognised by philosophers, writers and researchers from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Gros to Solnit, Kahn and Ingold. It is perhaps best summed up by Thich Nhat Hanh’s invitation to find peace in every step. Stepping off the busyness of life to gain perspective is therefore a serious activity and one that has been recommended as a search for presence, grace and right-relation. It represents a shift from ego to eco and as such can be viewed as ecological pilgrimage: a journey on foot through which we learn to live on the frontier between what we have to offer the world and what the world can offer us. Such encounters happen at the crossroads and, in this liminal between-space, we must open to possibility and cultivate abundance thinking. Bayo Akomolafe speaks of Esu, the Yoruba trickster god of the crossroads, a god who holds agency, disciplining our hubris, our claims to certainty and completeness, our desire for power-over. In any encounter with nature, we cannot pretend to control the outcome. We must seek instead power-with and learn to embrace Esu’s gift, the gift of the crossroads. 

In this workshop, we will explore Edinburgh’s wild places and learn how we can meet nature in any given moment, whether that consist of the wind dancing with the trees and across our faces, of the falling and fallen leaves finding new roles for themselves, or of watching migratory birds seeking and feasting on the larders that sustain them through the winter months. There is always a rhythm to nature and we can learn to attune to these rhythms and rediscover the wisdom of the seasons and of life itself. This workshop will explore the practice of ecological pilgrimage as a qualitative methodology for slowing down and being present. As such it may help us in tending our fraught relations with the world and in taking our path making more-or-less seriously to better realise transformative learning.