I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself – as I did every damn time – the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always.
It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.
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.
We are all savages inside. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed.
He was a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute.
You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.
Here it could be the fourth of July or the tenth of December. These mountains didn’t count the days. The.
The unifying theme is resilience and faith.
What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done?
I want to see the contours of your second beating heart.
I didn’t want to hurt for him anymore, to wonder whether in leaving him I’d made a mistake, to torment myself with all the ways I’d wronged him.
I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose.
So much had been denied me, I reasoned. Why should I deny myself?
But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding.
I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right. I.
It’s the place where things are born, where they begin. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it as something new and alive.
What are your spiritual beliefs? I do not believe in God as most people conceive of God, but I believe there is a divine spirit in each of us. I believe there is something bigger than our individual selves that we can touch when we live our lives with integrity, compassion, and love.
An REI worker had encouraged me to buy a box of Spenco 2nd Skin – gel patches meant to treat burns that also happened to be great for blisters.
There was nothing to do but go on.
When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties.