Quotes About Journey

The people in my life were like the BandAids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone.

It was the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

Going down, I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.

Of all the things that convinced me that I should not be afraid while on this journey, of all the things I'd made myself believe so I could hike the PCT, the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.

Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren't things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched.

The thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.

Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith.

With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

I had arrived. I'd done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I'd always tell myself though I didn't know the meaning of it just yet.

the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember

But I had walked here, and I wasn't ready to give up on seeing the High Sierra just yet.

Dónde estaba mi madre?, me pregunté. Había cargado con ella durante mucho tiempo, tambaleándome bajo su peso. «Al otro lado del río», me permití pensar. Y algo dentro de mí se liberó. En

I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-six years old and an orphan too. An actual stray, a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before, when I'd told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world.

The PCT had taught me what a mile was

An arrow pointed into its center, above which were written the words YOU ARE HERE. This image had become ubiquitous on T-shirts as well as posters and I always felt mildly irritated by it, unsure of how to take it, whether it was meant to be comical or grave, to indicate the largeness of our lives or the insignificance.

Nella vita ci sono un'alba e un tramonto ogni giorno. E tu puoi scegliere di essere presente, puoi metterti sulla strada della bellezza.

The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

But the opposite was true. The people in my life were like the Band-Aids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone.

Every now and then I could see myself--truly see myself--and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was "the woman with the hole in her heart." That was me. That was why I'd longed for a companion the night before. That was why I was here, naked in a motel, with this preposterous idea of hiking alone for three months on the PCT.

me back and the bull that would take me forward. And so I walked on. It took all I had to cover nine miles a day. To cover nine miles a day was a physical achievement far beyond anything I'd ever done. Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was,

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn't a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before.

world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.

I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.