Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.
The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.
A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.
But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.
What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
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.
And every last one of us can do better than give up.
Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
You get to define the terms of your life.
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.
I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.
Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he’d become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.
But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
The only way out of a hole is to climb out.
My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.
Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.
He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.
Wanting to leave is enough.