As promised, we have an update from Ann de Forest on her experiences at the Shillim Institute in the mountains of southern India. Through editing our book Ways of Walking, she came in contact with “walking artists” around the world, and she has been invited to several conferences, residencies, and outdoor adventures. Here is her account of her latest exploration.

In February 2024, I was invited to be artist-in-residence at the Shillim Institute, to experience the 2000-acre nature preserve and eco-retreat in the heart of India’s Western Ghats by walking. Over the course of 16 days, I made 20 distinct walks, including:

• exploratory ambles along the landscaped paths of the retreat center
• avi-fauna surveys of the forest with Shillim’s ecologists
• immersive daylong treks led by local village “forest guards” across high mesas, up and down rocky streambeds, through dry meadows and into sacred groves
• solo “Goldilocks” forays on utility paths and other hidden trails just to see where they led
• a walk through the village where the forest guards live
• a pilgrimage to caves carved by itinerant Buddhist monks in the first century B.C.E.

In all these walks, I focused on portals, passageways, and edges, noting the places where landscape turns wild, where grassland becomes forest, where stone meets water or trees meet earth, where humans connect with the extra-human. At the end of two weeks, I led a “walkshop,” inviting others to experience Shillim’s many subtle transitions, aural and aromatic as well as visual. I am now writing a series of prompts drawn from my Shillim walks, so that others can move there, as I did, from acquaintance to intimacy.

Walking is a cumulative experience. Every day at Shillim, my relationship with the mountains and the life they sustain—the trees, the birds, insects, and mammals (seen, heard, or merely glimpsed through the traces they left), and the people who walked with me—grew and deepened. “The thing to be known grows with the knowing,” Nan Shepherd wrote in The Living Mountain, reflecting on her lifelong relationship with Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains. In presenting my experience at Shillim, I hope to show how a short but immersive period walking in an unfamiliar landscape can lead to an intense and close connection to a place that is also a form of knowing.

Looking Ahead

Ways of Walking has drawn so much response, and connected us with so many interesting people, that we've begun to plan a series around the theme of walking. Not travel books, and definitely not exercise books, but works of literary fiction or creative nonfiction exploring the relationships and connections that emerge when people move through space at human speed.