This retreat is led by walker, poet and retreat facilitator Rosie Miles.
Over the past few years Rosie has been walking the South West Coast Path in substantial chunks (Poole to Minehead), and she has now walked the entire south coast stretch (373 miles). She walks solo, carrying everything she needs in her rucksack. Her website is https://www.rosiemilespoet.com/
Rosie believes strongly that walking has a great deal to teach us about living well, and she has recently written an essay titled ‘Towards a Feminist Spirituality of Walking’ (due out in From the Shores of Silence: Conversations in Feminist Practical Theology, 2022).
She writes:
Walking is among our most ordinary and unnoticed activities, but it can also be a highly intentional, invigorating and replenishing experience. We can go for short walks in our neighbourhood, or much longer ‘planned’ walks along the myriad paths and trails that criss-cross these islands.
“To walk is to experience the real”, says philosopher Fréderic Gros, and Rebecca Solnit writes of how the ancient practice of pilgrimage is a “literal means of [enacting a] spiritual journey”.
Come and spend several days at Othona, as spring wakes up the landscape. We will both walk (on the South West Coast Path, and inland) and explore extracts from the wealth of writing about walking in prose and poetry. The writers who will help us do this include Robert Macfarlane, Raynor Winn, Kerri Andrews, Graham B. Ussher, Thomas A. Clark, Fréderic Gros, Rebecca Solnit and more, and we will reflect on what a ‘spirituality of walking’ might look like, individually and as a group.
Historically, a good deal of the writing about walking has been done by men, and we will explore why this is so and also how more recently women are claiming their voices as walkers and travellers. Robert Macfarlane writes of walking as “enabling sight and thought … [and] paths as offering … ways of feeling, being and knowing”. This is very much the spirit of our journeying together over this Easter week.
Rosie Miles lives in Birmingham and has spent over 20 years as an academic and educator, teaching English literature. She now offers poetry courses, workshops, mentoring and occasional residential events/retreats under the banner Poetry with Soul.