A world built for automobiles is stressful There’s an intersection in my small Montana town that is an absolute nightmare. It’s where a busy highway crawls into downtown and makes a hard 90-degree bend. All four incoming roads to the intersection have a left- and/or right-turn lane. Trying to cross…

How interoception can guide us — The powers of our digital age seem intent on divorcing human experiences of the world from our bodies, or at best hacking into the body to redirect those experiences. But we know so little about embodiment and the mind-body connection. …

The walking essays that changed my path — There’s an extensive list on my website of books that I referred to while writing A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom One Step at a Time. They’re broken up into handy categories: Mind/Body, History/Culture, Memoir/Travel, Urban Planning, and a separate section of delights like Robert Moor’s On…

A closer look at the magical vestibular system — Some years ago, I headed out for an early morning downhill ski, and one run later ended up with nausea and a headache that lasted for 24 hours. It was one of those not-infrequent days when the mountain was covered in fog so thick that visibility was near zero. I…

A crack of ice leads to reminders of the mind-body connection — For the past several months, as my kid and I walked to school, we spent every morning seeking out ice: small puddles that had lightly frozen over, or the crinkly edges of snowmelt along the sidewalk. …

Switch gears fast, get your butt out of the chair, and most importantly, get to know yourself — 1. Learn to shift gears The first day my son ever went to daycare, for a whole two hours, the sudden release of time and attention almost made me dizzy. I wasn’t yet back to working and could have done anything with that time: a yoga class, grocery shopping, a nap. But instead I went…

K-12 textbooks aren’t subject to critical race theory, but they are full of mistakes — When I tell people I’m a freelance editor, they get interested. When I specify that I’m a freelance copy editor for K-12 textbook publishers, their eyes glaze over. And it’s true, copy editing textbooks is a tedious job. There isn’t a lot of variety. (I wish the moral panic about…

A conversation with Annabel Abbs, author of Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women — Of all the billions of humans who have existed since Homo sapiens first evolved, you’d think from the way we approach our bipedal walking as a literary subject that it was important only to a handful, and almost all of those men. In the U.S., Henry David Thoreau comes up…

I grew up hiking and walking in the National Forest lands around Montana’s Gallatin Valley, and camping and fishing in Yellowstone National Park. …