Quotes About Journey

them. I looked at the place I'd come from and the place I was going, the two equidistant from me. I was too far from either, so I forced my way forward.

Bagby Hot Springs.

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again.

Oregón! —exclamó, y casi me dejé arrastrar por el júbilo de su voz, casi me llevó a creer que esos 320 kilómetros eran coser y cantar, pero de sobra sabía que no era así. Para mí, todas y cada una de las semanas en el sendero habían sido un suplicio. —Oregón —admití,

Kennedy Meadows

At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.

There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It's good you've worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

What is hiking but walking, after all ?

These things are your becoming.

Until, that is, a tree stopped me in my path.

By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I've never been.

was who I was: the same woman who pulsed beneath the bruise of her old life, only now I was somewhere else.

I looked north, in its direction—the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I'd been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.

life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

I'd been on the PCT for a little more than a month. It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.

We are here to build the house.

I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. I was there now. Or close.

I could only choose between the bull that would take me back and the bull that would take me forward. And so I walked on.

I'd imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I'd thought I'd weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.

I'd thought I'd weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey.

The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself.

the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard.

The words are purposes. The words are maps. ADRIENNE RICH, "Diving into the Wreck" Will you take me as I am? Will you? JONI MITCHELL, "California