Walkabout and Whittles - connecting with nature

Walkabout is an Aboriginal word that has been appropriated pretty much globally, and, as Ray Mears says, "taken on a life of its own". The word has always been used in my family, presumably gleaned from that old novel Walkabout. As a young person I would often be walking with my father, and my mother would say, ‘the boys have gone walkabout.’ As I got older, I have continued to walkabout and have found it really important to connect with nature but also my sense of well-being, physical and mental health. The other aspect of this is my whittling and woodcarving, this has also become my hobby and a part of my self-care. I truly believe that the secret of life and the Universe, and our connection to the godhead is creativity, and that doesn’t mean painting a master-piece and being a famous artist and all that Ego stuff, but to engage with life in a creative way, whatever we are doing. 

You know, both walking and whittling has become a 'spiritual' thing for me. I don’t know much about other people’s spirituality, often it sounds like hippy-dippy bullshit to me, but what I have learnt, through my own experience in nature has become my own private and personal and pragmatic spiritual belief. And it works for me. I guess to a certain extent woodcarving has a place in religion, and in the Bible, according the Gospel Joseph was a carpenter, and if this is so, perhaps Yeshua (Jesus) was also trained to carve wood. As I carve wood and the grain appears, swirling,  it reminds me of the Universe and planets on their trajectories, and perhaps Super Strings or something of that quantum ilk.

Walking a path has a analogy of walking a spiritual path, a little like Dante’s pilgrim walking a path through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, but it is also an analogy of walking Life’s paths. Along the path we find obstacles to overcome, and sometimes if we walk the same path over and over again, we can try different ways of overcoming the same obstacle. Because when we don’t learn a life-lesson we get the same cycle again and again until we do learn to deal with it in a different way. Likewise with whittling, it is like life, sometimes we create a wonderful woodcarving but sometimes that begins with a mistake. We make a bad mistake in the first few cuts and think it is ruined but as we work to fix the mistake, we find that often a bad thing can lead to a good thing. As such timelines and trajectories are often on my mind, can we jump to a different path and a different destiny?