INTRODUCTION

Dear Reader,

About two years ago, I was browsing in a favorite dusty old bookshop, one that I frequent when I am in need of a random book find. On this particular day I found myself in the poetry section and picked up a worn hardback copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. As I began to flip through the pages, I noticed some handwriting in the book. On the inside cover was written “WW will show you the way.” On the title page was scribbled “Solvitur ambulando,” and underneath that, “The Wander Society” with a small thunderbolt symbol. Fanning through the pages, I found some underlined passages and several more interesting-looking symbols in the margins.

After seeing this I found myself a bit winded and excited. It seemed that this particular volume had its own mystery embedded in its pages. What was the Wander Society? What did the random phrase mean? I wanted to find out more.

I carried the book up to the register and excitedly paid the clerk the fifteen dollars. I left hurriedly, feeling like I had just received a secret message from the universe, determined to find out as much as I could about the Wander Society.

I started with a Google search and uncovered a website for the Wander Society. I hoped it would provide a clue into the group’s reason for being. I’ll admit: Part of me was prepared to be disappointed, thinking that perhaps this was some kind of promotional campaign for a large uncaring corporation. But when I plugged the URL into the browser, I was greeted with a black page featuring only a white thunderbolt in the middle of the page. Nothing was clickable. Next, I looked up “Solvitur ambulando.” The phrase was Latin, and translated to “It is solved by walking.” Interesting, but I still wasn’t sure what came next. This was clearly going to take a little more detective work—possibly a lot more. But where to go now?

I decided to consult Walt Whitman. He was the source of my discovery after all, and I was intrigued by the message “WW will show you the way.”

I should preface the next few paragraphs with the fact that I have limited training in literature. Aside from high school, and both an English literature and poetry class in college, I am basically self-taught. But having worked for upwards of twenty years in bookstores, I do consider myself fairly well read. In my twenties and thirties, I devoured as much classical literature as I could, determined to uncover the keys to existence in the classics of philosophy, Eastern religions, comparative mythology, postmodern theory, cultural theory, and more. In a period that I referred to as “my research,” I dove headfirst into works by Socrates, Spinoza, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Barthes, Certeau, Debord, Derrida, Foucault, Eco, Emerson, Husserl, Nietzsche, Sartre, Thoreau, Watts, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Campbell, and Capra just to name a few.

However, despite all of my reading during that time, I am sad to say I never sat down with Whitman. I had read about him in the poetry class and been exposed to a couple of his most popular poems, but the rest of his work somehow eluded my gaze. When I think about it now, his absence during this time seems strange. He definitely frequents a lot of the same circles of literature I was dipping into. But I believe that the right books come to you at a time when you are ready to read them, and I’ve come to think I wasn’t ready for Whitman. Yet.

And so, it is in this way that I came to spend a sun-dappled afternoon on a hammock with Leaves of Grass. Only a few other times in my life have I been so moved by a book. Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and a few others left me with a feeling that my heart had just expanded a couple of sizes. Somehow these books sit in your body and leave it altered in a way that is ineffable. But reading Walt took that experience further.

It was in many ways a physical experience: my chest ached, my breath quickened, and my face flushed. But it was also like the act of reading it was literally causing my soul to open. The best way I can describe first reading Whitman is that it was similar to the sensation of falling in love with someone. You inhabit the world with a giddiness and a joy, as if just existing in the world makes you feel like you are going to explode. (Even now, writing this feels inadequate, the words clichéd.)

Reading Walt Whitman woke up a part of me that wants to run and yell and punch things. It’s a feeling similar to when I am working on a creative project and a new idea comes in, and I know I am fully alive and awake and ready to take over the world. I felt like Walt was speaking directly to me in such a close, intimate way, sharing all of his secrets, giving me access to another plane of consciousness, one that I had only scratched the surface of in all of my research.

As I moved through Leaves of Grass, I noticed the following passage was underlined:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

I inhaled deeply, needing to get more air into my lungs.

How was it possible that a book could make me feel this way?

Whoever or whatever this mysterious Wander Society was, it had introduced me to Walt, and I was grateful. I decided I needed to find out more—it was going to be my personal quest. I was unsure exactly what it was or who was at the root of it all. What I did know was that it felt big. So much bigger than me.

I will not lie—I had definite reservations, fears. Most notably a fear of the unknown, something I had felt many times before. And I had no other leads. No next step to take. But I did have Walt, and I knew he had much more to share with me.

The next day, over coffee, I shared my experience with a friend, handing her the book and explaining how it came to me. After perusing it, she looked up at me with a familiar giddy expression, eyes shining.

“What is this?!?” she exclaimed.

“I am not sure,” I replied, “but are you in?”

“Definitely, yes.”

She wisely suggested I take a closer look at the clues I’d been given. So, later that day, I started a new journal, starting with what I had discovered already:

First up: Solvitur ambulando. “It is solved by walking.”

Next, the line from Whitman: If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

Aha! Clearly, I needed to walk, to wander. And so I set out. My only objective was to journey with my eyes open. This was to be my new practice, every day. Open to the unknown, completely awake, I would wander.

A few days later I received an excited voice mail from my friend: “Call me back as soon as possible!” When I got her on the phone she was slightly out of breath.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You are not going to believe what I just found!” she said. “It looks like more from the Wander Society! Can you meet me somewhere?”

We arranged to meet at a local café within the hour.

When I got there, she pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket. From where I was sitting, I could see “The Wander Society” written on the front, along with the now familiar thunderbolt with the circle around it.

When I unfolded the paper, I immediately saw a photo of a youngish girl wearing a kerchief, approximately fifteen to eighteen years of age, standing on a fallen tree. She had one elbow raised and covering her face as if to hide her identity. In the other hand she carried what appeared to be a small book. There were other photos in the pamphlet all depicting people slightly hidden or on some kind of path.

Interspersed amid the images was the following message:

An extremely high percentage of great thinkers, writers, philosophers throughout history have been avid wanderers or used the act of walking aimlessly as a way to fuel and influence their work. What is it about the act of wandering that feeds the creative mind? How does it allow us to access deeper layers of consciousness? Wandering is not a mindless task, but instead the opposite, the gateway to enlightenment. A surrender to the great mystery.

The feeling of giddiness came back and I felt consumed by it.

“Where did you find this?”

“It was in a small cardboard station, attached to a telephone pole downtown.

“And that’s not all. I also found a sticker with the image of Walt Whitman on a post downtown. We must be living in the center of the Wander Society!”

In the days and weeks that followed, I continued to see references to and imagery of Walt everywhere. Often near bookstores. A couple of times I found the slogans written on walls: “WW will show you the way” and “Solvitur ambulando.” Each time, I felt like someone was communicating a secret message just to me. I documented all of them. I confess that I became completely obsessed.

In the meantime, my own wanderings had opened me up in ways that I had not experienced since I was a child. Similar to my experiences with meditation, I still didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but it didn’t really matter. I felt more present in my body, and I regularly got the urge to run and sing while wandering. What was happening? It felt like I was inside some large interactive game, one that was created by Walt himself. But I still had so many questions.

Over the course of the next year, I collected dozens of pamphlets and pieces of Wander Society literature found in various Wander Society stations all over my town. It is these items that I am sharing with you in this book. During my research I also stumbled onto the website of a professor, J. Tindlebaum. Like me, he had become intrigued by the Wander Society and had made documenting the movements and writings of the group part of his work. It is Professor Tindlebaum who provided me with much more of the literature that I have provided in this book, and I am deeply indebted to him for his generosity and intellect.

It is not my intent to capitalize on the writings of the Wander Society. Instead, I genuinely wish to share its message with you. I can say with all my heart that the practice of wandering has changed my life, and I believe it has the power to change the world if practiced regularly and with an open heart. That is why I am deeply committed to furthering the efforts and endeavors of the Wander Society itself.

While we cannot say for sure exactly who the Wander Society is, I believe its members exist to aid us in our quest to discover our own deepest soul life, to help us move to a higher plane of consciousness. That is the theme that seems to repeat itself again and again in its literature. And it’s the message of their undeclared leader, Mr. Whitman himself.

I will end with his own words:

Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Sincerely yours,

Note: The handwritten comments and annotations are my own personal notes, insights, and observations as I began to document the literature of the Wander Society. What you read is unedited.