Quotes About Discovery

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

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.

I was bypassing the High Sierra—missing Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Tuolumne Meadows and the John Muir and Desolation wildernesses

that I didn't have to be amazed by him anymore. There were so many other amazing things in this world. They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it,

The PCT had taught me what a mile was

They opened my mind to realities I didn't know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much.

It was good. It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this world. Like I'd found an actual planet that I didn't know had been there all along. Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain.

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.

Bagby Hot Springs.

Kennedy Meadows

But the thing was, I didn't want it. Maybe I never really had. 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.

Oregon. Oregon. Oregon.

What is hiking but walking, after all ?

It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn't even know I wanted until I didn't get it.

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

open with my knife. Inside, carefully wrapped

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.

Of course, heroin could be had there too, I thought. But the thing was, I didn't want it. Maybe I never really had. 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.O

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. 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.

planting a root in the very center of my rootlessness.

The words are purposes. The words are maps. ADRIENNE RICH, "Diving into the Wreck

I walked through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face.

I was lost but I was not afraid,