Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.

Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.

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.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.