OUT OF EDEN WALK

“Each day is a journey, the journey itself home,” wrote the 17th-century Japanese poet-walker, Matsuo Basho. For those of us in our 60s and beyond, life as a journey is a concept we can understand. We’ve wandered as though in a dark wood, and we’ve walked with purpose. We’ve upsized, downsized, and for long stretches same-sized. We’ve had our tickets punched at the way stations of births and deaths, promotions and disappointments, illnesses and healings. From our vantage point of decades traversed, life is a journey.

After retiring as a school librarian (in my last year, I organized a K-through-8th grade, school-wide Global Bazaar based on the Out of Eden Walk), I turned my attention to conducting courses for seniors through Anne Arundel Community College's Department of Lifelong Learning, in my home state of Maryland.

I’ve led courses on Shakespeare’s plays, American theatre, Irish poets, U.S. founding documents, World War I poets, Winston Churchill, the nature of happiness, and the literature of wisdom and wit. These topics are unified by a love of language, curiosity, inquiry, exploration, and—on the part of my students—fearlessness to tread unfamiliar territory. The courses are seminar-style learning, rooted in my graduate studies at St. John’s College, Annapolis, where conversation centers on classic works and enduring questions.

At senior centers across the county, my class members read a text (it could be a poem or a brief extract from prose, a film, a speech, or a piece of music)—usually aloud in the classroom—ask open-ended questions, and engage in discussion about the ideas inherent in the material. For a long time, I’ve wanted to build a course based on Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk (OOEW) that’s designed specifically for older adults.

OOEW, since its inception, has partnered with major educational organizations. Educational resources have reached tens of thousands of students and teachers from grade school to grad school in the United States and more than 50 countries. Now I propose curricula for “grand” school.

Most older adults may have retired from a work-oriented schedule, but we continue being curious and open to the world. We now have the time to replenish, reset, and refresh our learning muscles. Exercising our brains is as important as moving our bodies in our later years. With the Out of Eden Walk, we have a context that inspires both.

Besides thinking and moving, a third component in older adult education is crucially important: social engagement. By 2030, 70 million people in the U.S. will be older than 65, according to census data, many of whom live alone and are at increased risk for loneliness and depression.

In thinking about how to adapt material from the Out of Eden Walk specifically for senior learners, two things came together.

The first occurred in the summer of 2021. I took a St. John’s College seminar at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the writings of Basho, the wayfaring poet and prose stylist who wrote five travel journals. His last, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is a classic of Japanese literature. I saw a connection between Basho’s writings from the late 1600s and Paul Salopek’s dispatches from the walking trail in the 21st century. Both are master storytellers and word wranglers.

I decided that Basho and Paul would be paired as our regular walking guides in a 10-week, 20-hour course this spring I called “Writers on Walking: Exploring Restless.” In this seminar, we would “walk” through time and space. As Paul wrote in his first story about the walk for National Geographic magazine, “I have embarked on this project to relearn the contours of our planet. To think. To write. To render current events as a form of pilgrimage. I walk, as everyone does, to see what lies ahead. I walk to remember.”

Secondly, I learned that Out of Eden Walk’s localized walking and storytelling program, which began five years ago in Chicago, had developed an online program called “HomeStories,” which is an interactive map-based storytelling platform. Anyone from anywhere in the world can add their stories to this map. It’s popular with educators, and lesson plans and other resources for its use are available for free online. The platform incorporates Paul Salopek’s Milestone questions into a user-friendly and privacy-protected storytelling template that invites people everywhere to post geotagged multimedia narratives of their own experiences of “home”—another way the Out of Eden Walk builds bridges of understanding and empathy across borders.

HomeStories is a gift for lifelong learners, who can use the venue to speak of their long-lived experiences and to reach across generations, sharing their curiosity, engagement, and wisdom. I’m looking forward to incorporating HomeStories in our planned fall 2022 course, “Exploring China on Foot: A Storyteller’s Journey.”

We’ve completed our spring course, “Writers on Walking: Exploring Restlessness.” About 35 participants from Anne Arundel County “walked” with Paul and Basho, and each week we had a guest walking guide—canonical and contemporary writers on the connections between walking and life. Having Paul and Basho as our leader-guides demonstrated the timeless universality of human restlessness and the call of the unknown. Among our guest companions were Dante, Chaucer, Johnson and Boswell, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Thoreau. Contemporary writers included Rebecca Solnit, Anna Badkhen, Bill Bryson, and Thich Nhat Hanh.

We saw walking as reflected in literature, philosophy, religion, and science. We looked at walking from the point of view of exploration, meditation, pilgrimage, protest, nomadism, and science. We recognized that it can be solitary; it can be social. Writers were represented by poems, short essays, and brief passages for in-class readings and discussion.

I hoped the course would provide regular, lively, and stimulating discussion grounded in our shared readings and viewings. During our discussions, class participants collaborated as creative, critical thinkers, exercising new ways of thinking and speaking. Not only did class members engage with the material. Importantly, they engaged with each other because of the material. We all had opportunities to create new friendships based on shared inquiry.

Participants explored their own opinions and framed responses within/around their life experiences. We continued to learn how to learn. Asking questions, exchanging ideas, examining assumptions, listening closely, tolerating perspectives, and growing in self-discovery while being inspired to move by great writers were the hallmarks. With the Out of Eden Walk setting our direction, these were our goals:

To understand our present world at the slow pace of walking

To encounter individuals on their own terms

To see into the conditions of our current time—migration, social upheaval, pandemic, sustainability, conflict, inequality—across the planet

To appreciate a timeless and universal restlessness that impels discovery, adventure, and insight

To gain a grasp of geographies, histories, and cultures different from our own

To examine connections between the physical and emotional realms

To recognize that the act of walking can take many forms: pilgrimage, protest, meditation, health

To relate what we read to how we move

To enhance communications skills of reading aloud, listening, thinking, and speaking

To find points of entry into challenging, thought-provoking essays and poetry

To discover questioning strategies and identify key ideas

To explore questions for which the answers are uncertain

To read attentively

To listen actively

To think critically

To express ideas cogently and concisely

I emphasized that the weekly components were not selected because they “matched” thematically. The passages each used highly expressive language, and the content was rich in ideas and would be, I hoped, fruitful in conversation. Sometimes, in the flow of our two hours together, we might find connections among the readings, but that would be up to each individual reader. I had no agenda, academically or politically. The more the seniors spoke, and the less I spoke, the more I felt the class was a success.

We did have five ground rules: (1) Read the text closely; (2) Listen to others and don’t interrupt; (3) Speak clearly so all can hear you; (4) Give each other your respect; and (5) No consulting of digital devices! If we needed to know what the word “transhumance” meant, or the etymology of “pilgrim,” or where exactly was Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan, we would figure it out among ourselves or scratch that itch during break.

For each reading, I had prepared an opening question (or three or four, as I gauged the interests of the room). These were open-ended questions meant to spark thought and curiosity. I encouraged class participants to pose their own questions to the group, to find their own points of entry into a text. What does it mean to search for something intangible? How can getting lost be a good thing? What does it mean to forget the past? Does retracing others’ footsteps help you tell your own story? How does slowing down and telling stories overcome loneliness? What is the difference between a fact and an interpretation? What does it mean to “work” with versus pamper an animal?

I urged particular attention to things about which we were uncertain. Discussion prompts we made use of were: “I don’t understand this section… I’m confused by this claim… I wonder about…”

I gave each class three times a week to different groups. Every time the conversations, feelings, questions, and comments were different. I loved that!

Like walkers, sometimes we kept on the path blazed by the text, other times, we ranged and meandered, occasionally, we paused at overlooks. Over the course of 10 weeks, events in the world influenced the tenor of our talk.