For Edmund Husserl, the body serves as the zero-point of orientation – the point from which the world unfolds.^[1] The world is interpreted through this zero-point because of its relation to external things. He describes what he sees before him while acknowledging the unseen parts of the room behind him and actions and objects he cannot see but can hear in the distance.^[2]  The table is not incidental: it is the location where we study and learn, pay our bills, and record in our ledgers – a site of work and memory. The horizon beyond immediate perception is not empty, but, as Husserl writes, “populated with intuited possibilities and likelihoods”. The mobile body complicates Husserl’s vision involving work and memory and activates the senses through mobility, confronting ambulatory thoughts with ambulatory vision. The presence of the desk orients us and the objects seen and unseen shape the movement –what we know – how we come to know it and what is acknowledged as ‘knowable’ – is acquired as a result of these specific proximities.

Movement illuminates how these proximities develop subjectivities – revealing how one becomes aware of what is in reach (what is near) and what lies behind and beyond the horizon (what is out of reach).^[3] This conceptualisation recognises what we know to be behind and informs what we expect ahead of us. In the course of a walk, we might look for trail markers, plaques, and information boards, the physical trail, inclines, or declines—this informs the direction and distance of a walk, estimating physical requirements, or revealing what we are observing (about trees, vegetation, geology, or historical significance). This intuitive and tacit way of walking extends to our knowledge of the world and how we direct ourselves in life – as Sara Ahmed puts it, “a path is created by being followed and is followed by being created”.[4] The table, the markers in the visible field that position us, is not where knowledge rests, but where attention departs.

A phenomenological understanding of embodied knowledge extends beyond Husserl’s foundational insights through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who emphasises the body as an active, intentional system rather than a passive receptor of sensory information. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “our body is not primarily in space: it is of it” – embodied knowledge emerges through the body’s dynamic engagement with environmental demands rather than through static observation.[5] This perspective repositions the walking body as an instrument of enquiry that generates knowledge through its capacity to respond to, and act within, specific contexts.^[6] Contemporary affect theorist Lisa Blackman extends this relational quality identifying it as process: “we are always in excess of ourselves,” she writes – “singular-plural processes characterized by the strange paradox of being both ‘one-yet-many’.”[7]  Her framing implicates a kind of tension between realms that never-quite-settles in one or another, emphasizing how the embodied qualities of these crossings bring conscious awareness to the ‘link’ which allows for an embodied co-emergence of understanding of an/Other and self simultaneously.[8]

Blackman considers embodied subjects are constituted through relational encounters that exceed individual-institutional boundaries: embodied knowledge emerges through intracorporeal exchanges rather than through isolated bodily experiences. This relational understanding of embodiment proves particularly relevant to walking methodologies, where knowledge production occurs through the body’s encounters with landscapes and heritage sites, and not only passers-by but also the traces of other bodies that are resting or have moved through these spaces in the past. Jacques Lacan offers a complementary lens: “this picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze.”[9] The surface – whether page, path, or visual field – is not static.[10] The ‘field’ ahead is where desire gets caught and funnelled; we see what we are oriented to find. Blackman argues that subjects “are neither fully self-contained nor exist in affective symbiosis but become weaved together in complex, relational ways” — what is caught at the surface transmits between bodies.^[11]  I extend the concept of intracorporeal exchange to include both presence and absence, involving embodied knowledge that arises during moments where no other body is present.

The phenomenological approach taken during the crossing of routes and places is about the crossing between bodily intention and affective relation – a sense of space, time and narrative that emerges during an encounter.