Spurred by curiosity and courage, in 2013, Paul Salopek set out to retrace the footsteps of our ancestors’ global migration. The journey began in Ethiopia at one of the world’s oldest human fossil sites, Herto Bouri. Paul is currently walking through China, and will end all the way around the Earth, at Tierra Del Fuego, on the tip of Southern America. Paul’s 24,000-mile odyssey is a years-long experiment in slow journalism. Moving at the beat of his footsteps, Paul is walking the pathways of the first humans who migrated out of Africa in the Stone Age and made the Earth ours. Walking across the horizons of the Earth, he is witnessing and recording the major stories of our era, one step at a time.
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee practices and teaches a walking Sufi meditation and Dhikr (mantra) practice that offers an embodied space of relationship, witnessing and kinship with the Earth. This webinar will bring together the threads of walking as a storytelling practice and walking as a spiritual practice, and the qualities they both share, such as witnessing.
Together we will explore how the simple art of walking can return the rhythm of our life to the rhythm of the Earth; how it can revive our faith in the divine and in each other, and restore our courage as we face into an uncertain future.
“Whether we like it or not, we’re all walking into a bottleneck new century. With the climate crisis upon us, and with gigantic gaps in income, with rising tribalism across ideologies, we face a pretty difficult path ahead. A panorama of uncertainty. The walk teaches me this: That we stand a better chance of survival by walking together, by learning from each other, by listening to each other’s ideas, and by pulling each other as we move forward. There is a very old, old joy in this approach.” ~ Paul Salopek
“I think the task before us is to re-learn what it means to walk as if everywhere is a temple. To approach how we are in relationship to the Living Earth as if it were a temple. Because we have to find a way to create a foundation again and walking is a simple an essential way to create that foundation. To sing back into the landscape through our hearts and through our steps so that we can again remember what it means to walk in kinship with a landscape. ” ~ Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Paul Salopek is the founding executive director of the Out of Eden Walk Project. He is a journalist and writer, having reported globally for National Geographic magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Politico, Al Jazeera, BBC, PBS, Foreign Policy, and many other broadcasting networks and publications. Salopek is the recipient of several major print journalism awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes. Between 1996 and 2009, he reported for the Chicago Tribune, writing mostly about conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Prior to that, Salopek worked on staff for National Geographic magazine from 1992 to 1995. In 2012, he won a Nieman
Foundation Fellowship from Harvard University to study ancient human migrations and human genetics. Salopek also taught international reporting at Princeton University as a Princeton Ferris-McGraw fellow and was awarded an honorary PhD in humanities from Colby College. He holds a degree in environmental biology from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is an Emmy and Peabody award-nominated filmmaker, and a Naqshbandi Sufi teacher. His work has screened at New York Film Festival, Tribeca, SXSW, Hotdocs, Thessaloniki, Melbourne Intl Film Festival, Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, and exhibited at The Smithsonian and The Barbican. His films include Earthrise, The Atomic Tree, Sanctuaries of Silence, Counter Mapping, Elemental, Isle de Jean Charles, and Marie’s Dictionary. He is the founder, podcast host and executive editor of Emergence Magazine, a Webby winning and National Magazine Award nominated publication exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture and spirituality. He teaches retreats on Sufism and spiritual ecology worldwide.
This event forms part of a longer event series exploring what faith and moral courage look like in an age of polycrisis. Where does extraordinary courage come from? What can we learn from people who’ve risked everything to live up to their values? What forms of courage are especially needed in our age of unravelling, uncertainty and risk? How can we inspire ourselves and each other to grow our capacity to brave our limits? Are there insights from the world’s spiritual and faith traditions that can help us grow our courage?
Mishal Baig is the Communications and Research Co-ordinator at St Ethelburga’s. She helps with visioning and designing conferences and events coalescing from the themes of spiritual ecology, faith and moral courage, viewpoint diversity and bridging divides. She also helps with designing language and imagery for communications put out by the Centre. Her interest is especially attuned to Spiritual Ecology research and uses it as a guide and reference for her creative approach in work. She has been at the Centre since 2018, first as an intern for a year and a bit, and then as a staff member since 2020.
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