Güle güle, goodbye Turkey

This year of the walk feels like the best of the first two years in one. The physical nirvana of that first year, pushing myself, in part against the clock of a visa, but mostly because I love the feeling and the purpose of it. I gave up that pace, that purpose, in the second year, that year of avash, to answer a different purpose: feeling like I had new tools to move the needle on this anxiety that found me at nine years old and hasn’t let go in the twenty years since. Going slow forced me to confront what going fast let me ignore. I couldn’t even say exactly what those tools were/are… the nascent nerve endings of presence I s’pose? Opening myself up to connection by first accepting this: I have always been running away, and then turning and squinting to rewrite the story so it looked like a moving towards.

I knew I wanted to stretch out the limbs again, and I’ve done that — walking almost as far in the first two months of this year’s walk as I did in all of last year’s — but I didn’t want to sacrifice the connection that characterised year two, and, tentatively, I think it’s working? This isn’t a controlled experiment by any means, but these last two months have been spectacularly connective, maximally so, like almost everyday was just opening itself to me (which is the anxious way of saying: I have opened myself to almost everyday, to everyone). Turkey has been kind, and I have been kind; we have listened to each other, and found that we each have much to say. Slightly ironically, it’s all that connective tissue that has so far overpowered my ability to share much of anything with you lot; because it is so lovingly consuming that I haven’t wanted to pull myself away to simply reduce it to mere words. But now I must, because Turkey is behind me for now, and if I don’t try to so reduce the experience of it — and make space for a new language, new ground, and new encounters — I risk grieving its passing from here to the Caspian sea.

2.5 million steps across Turkey this year brings the walk north of 10 million steps total, but it would be truer to say this year is the third step. I still catch myself writing the story just so sometimes, but I also know that I am getting closer to the truth, to being able to articulate what it is I’ve been running from all this time. And I know that I am getting closer to speaking fully of what it is I am moving towards. The right words come to us in fragments, from a thousand different people, most recently from a winter of experiences with two remarkable people I met beside a highway near Babaeski in Turkey last year; an encounter with a profoundly inspiring South African woman who opened her heart and home to us on a cycling trip to Vancouver island; from the volatile camaraderie of a winter drawing club I started that surprised and delighted me a hundred times in those months, and delights me still now that I am far away by stretching its own limbs out further than it could have had I stayed. There will come a day when I won’t remember any of these things, but each and all of them will always have made me who I am.

These tales, in the “just-so story” tradition […], do not prove anything.