Wanting to leave is enough.

We are all at risk of something. Of ending up exactly where we began, of failing to imagine and find and know and actualize who we could be. The only difference is the distance of the leap.

That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.

I was trying to find a new home in the world.

...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.

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