BROKEN

It's been a while since I wrote, not because I didn't want to, but because I couldn't think of anything to say. Slowly, at the back of the silence, a realization came, at first no louder than a guilty whisper but now in crystal clear voice: I can't walk anymore. I mean I can walk around, and to the shops, and all the other ordinary destinations, and even quite possibly on occasional day walks, but those magnificent pilgrimages I embarked upon for almost 30 years, and which were a pathway to another world and into my soul, are over. 

Many years ago I fell in the bush as I hurled down a slippery granite slope towards the Coxes River. I fractured my L1 vertebrae, which healed over time, but the dislocation it caused in my sacroiliac joint has given me grief every since. Over a professional career of leading walks through extraordinary country, and a solo one from Melbourne to Sydney, I managed it. But nothing I do now seems to work. Pulling the rickswag wrenched the joint and the best I can now get is pain relief. But that's not walking for me. Walking for me was when you pushed up a mountain and looked back over the mist-laden heaven below, not in triumph but in wonder; it was when you set out on a destination and kept going no matter what. I walked to experience a soaring spirit and endorfen-fueled physicality that transported me to a place of exhilaration, not to limp along while my sacrum and pelvis argued behind me like lovers breaking up. In the words of the sage when he thought no one was listening - I'm fucked!

Lest this post trigger an avalanche of secret cures, please don't. I have had an intimate relationship with my back. I've cajoled it, nursed it, bribed it and rewarded it. Most of all I know it. I am like a ballet dancer friend of mine, not just because I've got great legs, but because he told me he knew the exact moment he took his last curtain call for The Australian Ballet. The knees just couldn't take one more bend. 

But there's more. I found that my heart, perhaps too soon in its recovery from a major heart attack, just couldn't drive me along as I needed. It and I need a lot more time to forge a new relationship. I mean it almost died and it wanted to take me with it. In the aftermath of my heart attack my response, always pre-disposed to the grand gesture, was to challenge it with a new adventure, to soar above reality on wing and a prayer. It's kind of worked in the past, but that time is over. 

Not sure what I will do now. I am in the South Australian town of Burra for the moment, developing festivals and workshops, encouraged that my gospel a cappella BURRA FESTIVALE has sold out already, three months before a word is sung. I have plans to make this little town a Home of the Boutique Festival, and operate beautiful, gorgeous, make-your-soul-sing workshops for artists, writers, film makers, sculptors and their kin, and when I am not here to keep traveling. 

I hope to write and to watch my little dog Ralph grow. I have my cameras and my creative mind is still intact, if a little lost. It's not just walking that I have lost but the places it took me. I miss those just as much.  I miss the spirits I imagined beside desert waterholes and views in which the soul expanded to eternity.

My body works fine except when I tell it to pull 40 kilos for 3,000 kilometres. I think there comes a time in life when you need to accept that sometimes things are just broken; and they can't be fixed; where the best you can do is keep going, even if it's with a limp. You keep your own counsel, listen for signs and try not to worry too much ... or as my mate, the unofficial Mayor of Nimbin said ... eat whole foods, lay of the sugar and don't worry, be happy!

I'll find a way to repay those few lovely people who sponsored my Big Walk. Not sure how just yet but I've got some ideas. There's always the beautiful photos of my travels you can download at high res, an appropriate reduction on one of my workshops for Australasians, and then there's something in the future which could be anything but will not, unfortunately, be a long walk. Perhaps I will just have to ask you to watch this space and keep the conversation going.