duration: between any two steps· place: a long lane· surrounds: the rhythm of legs
this is the small silence that lives between the foot leaving the ground and the foot returning. you do not normally notice it. when you do — usually because the road is soft, or because you are alone, or because you have just been told something you are now walking off — it expands. each step is an island and the silence is the strait between.
walking silences accumulate. they are short individually and infinite in series. by the third kilometre they have become a single long silence with footsteps embedded in it like punctuation; the road has been doing the speaking and you have only been editing. this is why people walk to think. they are not thinking while walking; they are listening to the walking think for them.
the festival of the quiet walk is forty minutes of this silence, end to end, lengthened by lantern and held in a line. one person told me afterwards that they had never noticed before that their two feet make slightly different sounds. the walking silence is what makes that difference audible.