Eight days before I begin guiding a walking retreat from Le Puy-en-Velay, I went looking for miles in Paris.
I found them on the Coulée verte René-Dumont, a linear park that follows nearly 3 miles of an old railway line through the 12th arrondissement.
The trains stopped running in 1969, and the park opened in 1993. What once carried railway carriages now holds roses, bamboo, mature lime trees, and birds happily living their lives, all of it 30 feet above the traffic and largely unnoticed by people passing underneath.
I came for the walking. My legs need the miles before the retreat begins on September 5. After a while, though, the distinction between training and practice began to disappear.
I had been thinking of these days in Paris as preparation for the real walking ahead. The Camino will give us distance, history, and the daily rhythm of getting up and following the route.
What it will not manufacture for us is attention.
That part can begin anywhere.
What Makes Walking Contemplative
Most of the time, walking is a way to get somewhere. The body moves while the mind runs ahead, toward the next appointment, the unfinished work, or whatever waits at the other end.
Contemplative walking invites us into something different. It asks you to let the place you are passing through interrupt your purposes.
The Aubrac Plateau (one focus along the retreat) does that. So does a viaduct in the 12th arrondissement, between a bakery and a rose bed.
The spiritual quality of the walk comes from something other than distance or the route's age. It begins when I stop treating the world around me as scenery. The lime tree overhead is living its own particular life, and so is the wren in the hedge, whether or not I ever look up.
Attention is how the relationship starts.
Almost every city has a place where this can happen. A park, a greenway, a canal path, a cemetery with old trees, a quiet street with something growing along it.
These places do not have to be grand. They need something living in them, and enough room for you to notice it.
Try This Where You Are
Find the nearest place with something living in it. It does not need to be picture-perfect, only alive. Fifteen or twenty minutes is enough.
Walk without music or a podcast. For these few minutes, choose no destination that matters. Let your pace fall below the one you use to get places, but walk as you feel comfortable.
Wait to be interested in life beyond yourself.
Resist searching for something profound or worthy of your attention, because looking too hard becomes another form of hurry or control. Allow something to draw your attention on its own.
It will usually be small and particular. One tree rather than the trees. One bird rather than the birdsong. One plant growing where you had never noticed it before.
When that happens, gently pause.
Stay longer than feels necessary. A minute is a long time when you are not trying to fill it. Notice what the living being is doing, which is never nothing. This being is always living its life as best it can. Like you.
You do not have to interpret it. No insight needs to arrive, and there is nothing here to accomplish.
Then walk on. That is the entire practice.
Next week I will do this on the route out of Le Puy. This week it was available 30 feet above the traffic in Paris.
The wren in the hedge does not know it is in Paris.
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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.
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This is wonderful and so helpful. What a discovery! Might you guide a contemplative walking tour of Paris someday?