You have to keep walking, no matter what. If you don’t, it’s a living death. You’re just standing in one place dying.
Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.
I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It’s as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.
The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.
Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very literally forced me to put one foot in front of the other at a time when emotionally I didn’t think I could do that.
There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.
People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there’s no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.
Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...
Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed.
The place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.
The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.
Being so alone and so silent for so long gave me the opportunity to see how our brains actually work. I think of that so often in my regular life, as I’m always interacting with people or with my computer or phone.
Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
Writing is hard for every last one of us – straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.
Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that’s the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.
That’s how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.
Acceptance is a small quiet room.