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.

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.

It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

I remember being absolutely rocked to my core by how profoundly I could love another human being.

I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.

One thing any backpacker will tell you is that it's tedious and monotonous. You're bored sometimes, so you really have to make the fun in your head.

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.