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

The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.

I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost

Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

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

Once I was in a cafe in Portland and the woman at the next table and I began chatting and in the course of our conversation she strongly recommend I visit this web site called 'The Rumpus' so I could read this advice column called 'Dear Sugar.' It was so painful not to tell her that in fact I was Sugar, but I didn't.