Solvitur ambulando

(Attributed to St. Augustine)

“It is solved by walking.” What exactly is solved by walking? He never said. Perhaps everything—well, at least a lot of things. At any rate, that’s what I discovered walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain several years ago. Søren Kierkegaard said, “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being…. I have walked myself into my best thoughts. I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”  Contemporary writer Rebecca Solnit says walking “is how the body measures itself against the earth,” and naturalist John Muir, who walked from Louisville, Kentucky, to Key West, Florida, confessed, “I only went out for a walk and … going out, I found, was really going in.”

As we move toward the end of the summer, after having spent more time outdoors, we’ll explore the meaning of walking from a symbolic and therapeutic perspective and its relation to the individuation process. There’s wisdom and truth that can only be discovered after one dare to leave home, step out on the road, and walk toward the path of the soul.

Labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, France

Kenneth Kovacs, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst-in-training (Diploma candidate) at the C.G. Jung Institute-Küsnacht and a member of the board of directors of the Jung Society of Washington.  Kenneth is also a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), having worked in congregations in St. Andrews, Scotland; Mendham, N.J.; and currently in Catonsville, Maryland, for more than twenty years.  He is a graduate of Rutgers University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he completed his Ph.D. in practical theology (theology and psychology).  He is the author of Encounter and Conviction: The Relational Theology of James E. Loder (Peter Lang, 2009) and Out of the Depths: Sermons and Essays (Parson’s Porch, 2016).