Dare to Heal, With Audacity
Some people arrive at the walk carrying something. By the end they have worked out they are not carrying it alone.
That is the quiet engine behind the Purple Wellness Walks, a monthly walk drawn from the children’s book Little Ms Purple: Khensani’s Green Planet Quest by GB Langa. The walks take the book off the shelf and turn it into a morning spent on your feet, with a pen, a journal and a few people who do not stay strangers for long.
Langa did not set out to build any of this. It started with a question about teachers. You cannot ask a school to look after its children if no one is looking after the adults holding it together. From there came a journal, then a circle of people who wanted to do the same thing together.
The walk has a rhythm. People gather in the morning, warm up and set off with a prompt from that month’s journal. They sit with it alone for a while, then pair up and share. By the time they reach the end they are talking properly, the kind of talking that has gone quiet in a world of screens and quick replies.
Langa speaks about it from the inside. “I built this out of my own healing,” Langa says. “I was the doctor who made the pill, then I took the pill I never knew I needed.”
At the centre is Khensani, eight years old, brave enough to stand in front of the people who run the world and ask them to do better. The walkers carry a little of that with them. As Khensani says in the book, “Because you have a big heart, you’re brave, you’re smart and you play your part purple.”
The walks happen at Starbucks, start to finish, with coffee in hand and the conversation running between the two stores.
“Some have mastered the language of healing without healing,” Langa says. “Purple says dare to heal, with audacity.”
