Why go Wayfaring?

The Good Old Future

Walking is our species’ evolutionary advantage, the travel we are designed to do best. Without cars, trains or planes, human movement is slow and intense. Discarding expectations of instant arrival, the whim of journey becomes sacred. No lines, straight or dead, restrain movement. Feet follow eyes follow mind follows heart. Freedom like this is no abstract noun, but a natural skill and active blessing, forcing responsibility, discovery and delight.

Wayfaring is an act of getting lost from ‘normal’ life, and rediscovering a world as strong and vibrant as it always will be. It is pure travel, self-powered, natural and ancestral.

Long after the last metal box has stuttered to a stop, we will stroll onward, meeting the trees, the animals, and our fellow humans. And it will be glorious, and simple, and is already afoot.

Waycation

We live in days when travel overseas has become less accessible. How we engage with this limitation is a creative choice for us to each make. The canvas is defined - what shall be our artistic response?

Wayfaring is the ultimate ‘staycation’. It is a path to meet this land and yourself as part of it. We have all been locked down, but Wayfaring is a path beyond the un-freedom of this last year (and the 1000 that preceded it). Living on the path, we can re-establish our animal independence and reclaim the fullness of our time, land and bodies.

During 2020, we saw the mass day-trip exodus of people from urban environments to rural beauty spots. But amongst all the over-filled carparks and litter, who really found the peace and beauty they sought?

Wayfaring helps us find what we seek in the spaces between the roads. By making our holidays into ongoing slow journeys via footpath, we can rediscover our inheritance of nomadic freedom. It is what we have been seeking all along.

Save the World

While Wayfaring, you learn about the natural world through direct experience. Local distinctiveness becomes apparent with every corner turned. Plants and trees and animals become allies who share and support our journeys.

Wayfaring is the opposite of book-learning:  it is the real thing, experience. You will encounter and meet many layers of nature and history, and witness them directly. So will grow your natural and social awareness of how our land and species has reached where it is today.

How can we love nature from a screen? And if we do not love nature, how can we summon and commit the energy necessary to protect her from rising threats? The natural environment of this land needs us to fall in love with her again, so we can remember our need to save her. Wayfaring is how we can do this.

It is hard in modern life to make sound ecological decisions. Everything comes with a plastic wrapper, and every tiny choice bears a heavy carbon footprint. But Wayfaring offers a sincerely healthy choice for our planet. Without heating, lights, cars or trains, electricity, fridges or screens, our impact will be as low as it possibly can be. Wayfaring lets us find our proper space within the eco-system we share. And that is a really good feeling, to no longer be a blight on our planet, but to resume our place as just another living animal, making our gentle way forward among all the others.

Annoy the King

Wayfaring is not for everyone, but neither is struggling to be the monkey with the most nuts.

Those who decide the rules in our society enjoy imposing their wills upon us, because there is advantage to be gained in doing so, and because they can. This is privilege and power they have inherited. As our people comply with ever-tightening restrictions, and surrender our oldest liberties, we know in our hearts that they shall not be returned.

Wayfaring offers us a path beyond these games of control, and gives us back our ancient state of simplest liberty, letting us control (and surrender) our immediate reality in ways we may have long forgotten. Wayfaring helps us restore our natural and righteous self-reliance, and helps us to remember the truth that despite all our arrangements and social persuasions, we are ultimately always free and self-responsible.

As the Wayfaring scholar J J Jusserand states, the great power of Wayfaring has always been to ‘annoy the King’. And in our modern age, with government and corporate kings aplenty, we can remember our freedom that is forever true by making a journey to joyfully and intentionally ‘annoy the King’.

You-Time

On the path, the everyday influences of colleagues, family and friends no longer dominate our lives. What we do - how we speak and think - the good we make true - becomes who we are.

Wayfaring gives us a simple chance to be our best selves, in a world replete with mechanisms to make such a goal nearly impossible. Wayfaring is an opportunity to be ‘just’ you, and to remember that this is more than enough. You are not the house you own/rent, or the car you drive, or the job you do. You are not the zeroes in your bank account - whether there are seven or just one. As a Wayfarer, the stripped back truth of you has room to breath and express itself, through the ancient art of journey.

Of course, this means you will also encounter your worst habits and thought-forms, your laziness, selfishness, anger and willingness to blame others. But without the comforting distractions of television, phone and work, you will have to face these bad neuronic shortcuts, and deal with them. This is what makes Wayfaring such a transformative experience. It removes the impediments to you being and meeting yourself.

In the modern world, who really owns their time? Not even the ultra-rich can afford such wealth. But the wayfarer inherits the earth.

Community

Britain is not a land of debt, crime and devastation, but an archipelago of vibrant communities, living histories, strong human kindness and intense natural beauty.

This land is peopled by a welcoming and cheerful people, who are willing to share food and shelter, who are excited about the challenges of the future, and who are very capable of thinking and acting powerfully for themselves.

People are doing great things all over the land, inspiring projects and incredible works. Community is no lost dream but a constant and diverse jewel that sometimes hides itself from the brash outsider, but always reasserts itself in the most subtle and joyous of living ways.

We are all strangers wandering a strange land, ultimately unsure of ourselves or our path. This is what binds us together. A wandering journey is the common metaphor for all humanity on earth. If we can recognize this, and understand the transitional nature of our existence, then perhaps forgiveness and healing become easier to find. We need only to support each others' quests, and trust that despite seeming disharmonies, they all fit together in some (as yet) invisible way that is vast and perfect.

The Wayfarer is an earthworm for static communities, turning and aerating the grassroots of society. Deep cultural memories of nomadism are within all of us, despite today our living mostly static lives, moving quickly back and forth in the same small patterns, from house to car to office to shop and back.

Wayfaring cuts through these cycles, offering a way to re-ascend our ruts. A Wayfarer moves beyond categories of dwelling-place and income-bracket, and erodes such petty ossifying definitions. A Wayfarer might walk beside a Duchess in the morning and a Tramp in the afternoon, and learn and share with each of them.

Wayfaring makes the world safer for everyone. When people travel only by car, community landscapes become hollow, and people within them are isolated and vulnerable. But if more people journey on foot, by street and footpath, the opportunity for harmful activities is greatly reduced. We can protect each other, in the way our species always has done, by actually being there when needed.

Mental Health

Taking control of your body, meeting small everyday challenges and mastering them, is deeply good for our minds. Life as a Wayfarer is simple, but its sense of reward and achievement is large and strong.

Wayfaring blows away the cobwebs of our corridored minds, to offer continuous fresh perspectives. It is harder to dwell in sorrow when you are moving through beauty all the time. The scent of a bluebell wood is potent ancient therapy. Problems that Wayfarers daily face - what to eat, where to sleep, how to stay warm and dry - are so large and vital that our smaller and more complex issues become eclipsed. Nature, with her beautiful basic requirements for life, can help to heal us, by making us pay more attention to what most truly matters.

Blood and Muscle

Walking is proven to reduce stress, and lessen the risk of all sorts of nasty illnesses, and a longer journey on foot intensifies these benefits. You will burn off fat and gain muscle. Your blood will flow more vigorously, and you will feel more alive. Wayfaring is intensively moderate exercise. Your breath, blood and skin know the truth of this. While Wayfaring, you feel more in contact with your body, and you can remember how to trust it more. Wayfaring is what you are made to do, and makes deep physical sense.