Sometimes all you can do is walk.
Or run.
Or sit.
Like Forrest Gump after the woman he loved walked away.
The man life always found felt hopelessly adrift—
until he started running.
And kept running.
That’s fiction.
Real life gives us its own versions.
A young Sam Shepard driving through the Midwest to see grandparents he barely knew—an experience that would inspire his Pulitzer-winning play, Buried Child. An odyssey not of conquest, but of return. A break from youthful whimsy or exhaustive ambition. A journey that opens a window, unlocks a door, reveals meaning. A reminder that life is more than whatever story has gripped us.
I love how Bob Dylan expressed this in Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.
For Dylan, it was Guthrie who reminded him that all the bullshit isn’t real. Dylan hitchhiked across the country to connect with that hope—an ember passed hand to hand, set ablaze for a generation—before retreating just long enough to save himself.
The monks walking for peace are not walking for pleasure.
They aren’t walking for a cliché.
They are walking because walking brings clarity.
A whole band of them walking attracts a movement. It’s simple—but so is an ember. So is running when you’ve lost everything and just want to feel again. So is retreating to Woodstock when you’ve crashed and need to restore the hope you can still sense. So is driving to your parents’ old home to understand why they are as they are.
Because sometimes outcome isn’t the point.
We don’t need a blaze.
We need the ember.
A fellow writer I respect posted a photograph of the monks—just walking, with their dog—and it mystified her. Do we need peace in America? Why walk here? Why not somewhere with “real” trouble?
It’s a fair question. But I think it misses the point.
Those of us in sleepy towns and busy cities—especially where things appear relatively peaceful—are the ones who need the ember most. We are the ones who can carry it forward. We are a confused and distracted mass with enormous potential, if we’ll only wake up.
I don’t pretend to know what’s in the minds of the monks. But I suspect that is the point: to wake us up. To wake the ones who can still do the most good.
Related reading:
• Buried Child, cornfields, and inheritance:
• Bob Dylan and the ember before the blaze:
