Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness.

I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.

You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.

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.

If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don't have to take it in. You don't have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. Don't own other people's crap.

Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it