I’ve recently completed a short contribution to the One Day in 2050 project – a vision of what a climate utopia might look like at mid-century. Almost inevitably, my chapter’s character is drawn to a stream on Dartmoor as a starting place for being connected to a network without limits, a circular enfolding of planet, people and care – a symbiotic knowing that is regenerative to its core – a deep learning that ‘enfolds, refolds, reintegrates, generates, regenerates, and spirals both inwards and outwards in an energetic dance that supports the whole whilst expanding every outward to create new community clusters whenever tendrils of learning reach into new places, take root, and flourish.’ Everything starts with the headwaters of one of Dartmoor’s rivers slowly seep from the moorland.

Dartmoor lends itself to a version of a Debordian dérive as desire lines twist and ply, coalesce in pools, join and interbraid, only to scatter into incipience. Centuries of sheep, ponies cattle and runners errant have left indelible marks in this pliant, saturated ground. There are few straight lines here, and as I drift through the moor and the moor through me, I am drawn into Rimbaud’s poem Le Bateau Ivre, when he dreams of  ‘La circulation des sèves inouïes’, the circular flow of life’s forces not yet known, and recognise it is this flow, this vigorous expression of forces just beneath our surfaces that is our greatest source of strength — where we are ‘invited to forget ourselves on purpose and . . . join the in the general dance.’

Where this flow of our entwined expressive forces percolates just beneath the surfaces of things is the place I most want to be — to feel how moving over uneven ground between intermittent pathways that constellate the moor brings us into dialogue between self and place. Even if that dialogue is itself uneven and stumbles over tussocks and through calf-deep pools, the movement is at least an overture and an invitation to thinking, learning and moving together.

The very core of this movement entwines with the vibrant patchwork of human experience championed by Appiah’s cosmopolitanism where he writes, ‘We need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association.’ What the relational turn has brought to discussions about connectivity, networks and ecological thinking in the context of these This powerful sentiment underscores the importance of forging connections among human and more-than-human worlds. The practice of writing ourselves onto a landscape whilst it writes itself into our bodies, our muscles, our skin, and soul is itself a radical networking into a complexity beyond ourselves.

When I run — as I did this morning, last week, and for hundreds of hours over the past four years — across the ever-changing terrain of Dartmoor, I feel like I gain entry not only to the grassy slopes and boggy mires, but entry to the complexities of self and place and world that are entwined here. Led by practice, I am afforded access to something larger still — a relationality built upon practice. Being led by practice can also allow us to contribute to this grand conversation and deepen our understanding of one another and foster a sense of potential in new relationships that can challenge profoundly embedded currents of exploitation, marginalisation and continuing rampant ecological degradation.

As I increase my mileage this season to prepare for some longer late-summer adventures, my place in the places I run begins to form a dynamic, interconnected dance is an invitation — or even an insistence — to engage the complexities of our world, find balance with one another on this uneven terrain, and with an encircling horizon find a way forward together.