The practical benefits of a daily walk are unquestionable. The National Sporting Goods Association ranks walking as the number one fitness sport, ahead of swimming, biking, and aerobics. Millions of Americans participate in "exercise walking." In the twenty-first century, however, walking is evolving into something even better. Physicians agree that walking can be beneficial in providing a sense of calm to its practitioners. James M. Rippe, M.D., author of Fit Over Forty (William Morrow), says that "forty minutes of walking at any speed will help reduce stress." Healthy Living Magazine reports that "during exercise, the brain relies more on the creative right side and less on the rigid left side, so new thought processes may be an inherent part of movement." Well-known experts in the fields of self-help and creativity such as Julia Cameron, Sark, and Jon Kabat-Zinn tout walking as a meditative and creativity-enhancing activity. Writer Brenda Ueland, a prolific writer in the 1930s, had this to say of walking: "I will tell you what I learned myself. For me a long, five -or six-mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day."

As a writer, I'm intrigued by the creative and meditative possibilities of walking. My own discovery of walking as a tool to enhance my creative potential came about somewhat by accident. For the past several years, I've used Sarah Ban Breathnach's Simple Abundance as a daily meditative guide. Having a good meditation or "thought for the day" to read before my daily walk was very important to me. It set the tone for reflection and spiritual connection as well as opened me to my deepest level of awareness. Later as I walked, however, I noticed that while at first I tended to reflect on the reading, at some point my mind began to relax and turn to exploring the beauty of the world around me. Somewhere in that process, I'd start to find metaphors for my writing in what I saw. Something inside me opened up and I made the connections between words and images-- I knew what I needed to say and how I needed to say it. I could go home, and the words would flow. This became such a valuable tool for me, I began to use it every day.

In addition, I discovered that walking enhanced my life in general. Things I saw in nature became metaphors for events that were happening in my life and these were magically translated into solutions for problems. Walking, I decided, provided an excellent source of therapy, a creative boost, and great exercise-- all free and available at any time!

While my daily reading of Simple Abundance provided some wonderful essays for thought and reflection, the more I walked the more I found myself wishing these meditations would help me in exploring the metaphors available to me in nature. As a result, I began as I walked to collect "ideas" for such a book. Walking Wonders: Stepping Your Way to a More Creative Life is the compilation of my ideas, explorations, discoveries.

Paying close attention to the world around you during daily walks not only increases your awareness of the deep beauty and interesting elements of nature, but also provides a myriad of metaphors and examples for life in general. If you walk in conjunction with reading this book, you will improve your powers of observation, and you'll also be able to incorporate greater productivity and creativity into any aspect of your life and find solutions to problems where you never thought of looking for them before. You'll awaken inner resources you never knew you possessed.

First, however, it's necessary to change how you observe the world. Most of us don't take time to "stop to smell the roses"; half the time we don't even see them because our minds are too full of the mental chatter we carry with us through our days. In her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit says that while walking, "the mind, body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking … frees us to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts." Walking Wonders helps create new patterns of discovery. Opening ourselves on a regular basis to the world of nature allows us to use and develop innate tools we all possess-- inspiration, focus, discipline, and reflection-- to discover deeper self-awareness. These tools are vital to any creative process and are referred to again and again in the essays in this book.

Walking Wonders offers each person opportunities to explore and define his or her own creative potential. Too many self-help books tell you what you should and shouldn't do rather than encouraging you to search for authenticity, meaning, and balance in a personal way. The book may be a companion, but the journey is yours alone. Each of us has inherent artistry and talent; it's just a question of discovering it for ourselves. In Walking Wonders, you'll find explorations to guide your walks, but the discoveries you make will be yours alone.