Jonathon Stalls - WALK: Slow Down, Wake Up, and Connect at 1-3 Miles per Hour

With a bold and honest voice, Jonathon Stalls invites us to walk with him across America. It is an important journey through a landscape of gender, equity, and discovery. In each meeting we learn who we are and who we might become. From sea to sea there are mountains with sticky spines, and deserts filled with people and solitude.

John Francis, PhD, author of Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking. 17 Years of Silence.

Jonathon and I have been walking and talking together for years. We walk and talk about strategies to create more walkable places, management approaches, dogs, love, relationshipseverything. This book captures the advice that Jonathon has given me over our hundreds of miles together: listen to your inner wisdom, lean into connections, and embrace your failures as a great teaching tool. WALK is not just a book. Its designed to take its readers on a meditative journey to enable us to open our eyes to ourselves and each other.

Lynn Richards, senior VP of policy and implementation at Blue Zones

Stalls is an important walking activist and his book recounts the adventure of a lifetime.

Angie Schmitt, author of Right of Way

WALK is a powerful invitation that shows us not just the gifts of walking, but what it means to be fully alive. Stalls reminds us what it means to live with a whole heart, even in the midst of our darkest times, and how walking as an individual and community actas a fundamental human rightcan repair our spirits along with our minds, bodies, and communities.

Antonia Malchik, author of A Walking Life

Jonathon Stallss new book is for all of us who are ready to embark on a journey of practice toward walking and rolling to connect, to build relationships with ourselves and our people, and with intention to build trusting, whole, and full lives. Whether it is a journey to our mailboxes or the entire length of the continentthis book gives us tools to practice walking and movement to heal, grow, love, nurture, explore, adventure, fight, dance, and become our full human selves. Life at 13 mph is how we were intended to experience our world. We must move more this way to feel more and more alive.

Teresa Martinez, cofounder and executive director of the Continental Divide Trail Coalition

Ive spent the last ten years of my life going on walks with Jonathon Stalls, so I am delighted that in WALK more people get to experience his warmth and brilliance too. May you feel what I do after every walk with him: more deeply and uncomplicatedly human.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, three-time New York Times best-selling author

In 2010, on a journey of self healing, Jonathon Stalls set out to walk coast-to-coast across the United States. That defining experience, and years of boot-level community work since, has honed his book into a trail guide to human connectivitya veritable map of the heart.

Paul Salopek, Out of Eden Walk

Jonathons personal journey is the starting point of a robust community journey, accompanied by heaping helpings of warmth, empathy, compassion, and insight.

Michael McGinn, executive director of America Walks and former Seattle Mayor

Copyright 2022 by Jonathon Stalls. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license. For more information, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0.

Published by

North Atlantic Books
Huichin, unceded Ohlone land
aka Berkeley, California
Interior art by Jonathon Stalls, Intrinsic Paths
Cover art zmshv via Getty Images
Cover design by Jasmine Hromjak
Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

WALK: Slow Down, Wake Up, and Connect at 13 Miles per Hour is sponsored and published by North Atlantic Books, an educational nonprofit based in the unceded Ohlone land Huichin (aka Berkeley, CA) that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are distributed to the US trade and internationally by Penguin Random House Publisher Services. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stalls, Jonathon, author.
Title: Walk : slow down, wake up, and connect at 1-3 miles per hour /
Jonathon Stalls.
Description: Berkeley, Califorinia : North Atlantic Books, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A collection
of essays on the power of walking to connect with ourselves, each other,
and nature for new avenues of renewal and changeProvided by
publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022000785 (print) | LCCN 2022000786 (ebook) | ISBN
9781623176952 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781623176969 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: WalkingPsychological aspects. | WalkingPhilosophy. |
WalkingHealth aspects.
Classification: LCC RA781.65 .S725 2022 (print) | LCC RA781.65 (ebook) |
DDC 613.7/176dc23/eng/20220316
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000785
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000786

To the wind, the trees, and millions of steps for saving my life

You are here with all your unique memories, parts, and experiences. As they are.

We are here. In a time where beauty aches to be seen. In a time where our wounds call us closer. In a time where disconnection and separation from our deeper selves, from each other, and our planet grows in devastating ways.

I am humbled and grateful that you have opened this book. I invite you, with courage and wonder, to imagine us, you and I, moving side by side. All that you are next to all that I am. All that I am next to all that you are.

Walking. My most cherished and respected teacher. I have come to know you as a profound and wondrous portal. You have humbly and courageously helped me to nurture my pain, inspire my imagination, release complex suppression, face systemic injustice, honor the cries and gifts of the planet, prioritize mental health, embrace the unknown, and so much more.

We have journeyed for tens of thousands of miles, more than I could ever count, through just about every landscape imaginable. Your pace and posture have helped me to move alongside hundreds of people from a variety of beliefs, abilities, and backgrounds for hours, days, and weeks at a time. You have utterly and completely transformed my one, precious life.

Dear reader, my education is the brush of wind between you and me while moving alongside each other. My education is the amount of time I have spent by the flowing stream and high-speed arterial roadways. My education is what I feel and experience when having spontaneous exchanges on streets, underpasses, and front porches beyond walls and screens. My education is resting on broken concrete curbs and taking naps under the shade of trees. My education is the one- to three-mile-an-hour manifestation of my own deep truths, shadows, and dreams naturally rising like a spring slowly surfacing so I can tend to them, listen to them, and nurture them the way I believe I was made to.

As I write this book, I am a late-thirtysomething, able-bodied, six-foot-four, white, queer/gay male (he/him/his) in the United States of America who grew up mostly middle-class. My lineage is a nomadic melting pot of people who immigrated to the United States of America from primarily Poland, the Czech Republic (Czechia), Scotland, England, and Ireland. This presents a significant number of privileges, blind spots, and gaps when referencing human movement through a variety of landscapes and neighborhoods. If you are Black, Indigenous, transgender, a person of color, LGBTQIA2S+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, two-spirit, and the countless ways people choose to identify), nonbinary, nonconforming, a woman, a person with a disability, a war veteran, an older adult, someone of lower or poverty class, or parents with kids and strollers, then your relationship to walking and rolling, especially wherever or however you want, is more than likely immeasurably different from mine.