Wednesday Walk Issue 7: A Story for Every Mile

Somewhere this summer, my walks picked up a story.

Lately I've been lacing up, pressing play, and letting a good narrator carry me somewhere else for a few miles. The loop around the block stays the same. The trip never does.

Here's what's been in my ears, and might be worth being in yours. (One of these three is the best thing I listened to all summer.)

Exploring · Belonging · Carrying

Exploring: from neighborhood loop to deep space

This one turns a quiet walk into an interstellar rescue mission. One minute you're passing the same mailbox, the next you're light-years from home, solving a problem no one else can. Ray Porter reads it. (His Rocky voice alone is worth the download.) If you're going to walk with it, the Socorro Western Boot is fitting: a celestial design over desert, for a story written among the stars.

🎧 Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, narrated by Ray Porter

Belonging: a story about the people who show up

Theo of Golden is about kindness and the small community that quietly forms around one person. Puffins know the feeling. They gather in crowds, return to the same shores, and look out for their own. Fitting, then, that the Lundi wears a hand-inked puffin design and is 100% vegan. A shoe about togetherness, for a story about the same.

🎧 Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

Carrying: the strength we inherit, and pass on

The Waterbearers follows three generations of Black women in one family: Sasha's grandmother Betty Jean, born on a Louisiana cotton plantation; her mother Connie, coming of age in the Texas bayous; and Sasha herself, growing up in 1990s Houston. Water runs from grandmother to mother to daughter, and so does everything else that had to be carried, the tenderness and the trauma, what was said and what was buried.

Sasha Bonét reads the audiobook herself. Her voice is silky, full of gravity, and holds all of it, the beauty and the ache in the same breath. The most captivating listen I had all summer. Poetry and wisdom in equal measure.

Two lines I keep sitting with:

"Their intimacy was forged in reminding each other of home despite their insistence on forgetting. They never spoke of the past, but their calloused hands and the cadence of their breath told the stories they had laid to rest inside themselves."

"I was raised to believe that each of us is the sum of our grandmothers' prayers."

The BADass Black Slip On is what I wore to walk with it. Understated, cushioned, unshowy. A shoe that carries you when a story is asking a lot of you.

🎧 The Waterbearers by Sasha Bonét, narrated by the author

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
— Philip Pullman

A few things I'm noticing

• Cicadas doing their end-of-summer encore, louder than any narrator.
• Three library holds coming through at once, always.

Wishing you long routes, good narrators, and a story worth slowing down for.

Wednesday Walk is a recurring series from Inkkas, a midweek ritual built around movement, nature, connection, and joy. New issue every month.

← Read Issue 6: The List · The Summit · The Escape