I sat in it for the rest of the afternoon, staring at the lake. I still had 334 miles to hike before I reached the Bridge of the Gods, but something made me feel as if I’d arrived. Like that blue water was telling me something I’d walked all this way to know.
This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water, what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.”
-Cheryl Strayed, Wild
I watched this movie with my friend after a day luxuriously full of words–all the words we had saved up for each other. We spent a quick few days eating, and talking, and enjoying her family, and talking, and seeing beautiful things, walking through the drizzle of Seattle, and talking. We sat in a theater and watched this woman walk 1100 miles alone, holding an enormous weight on her back, making her way to somewhere she needed to be. We felt the same heaviness and the same lightness, I think, about our shared history and our shared letting go.
We both used to have this big, complicated, form-giving understanding of the world and we both know now that it’s possible for that to fall away. We know the chaotic swirl of possibilities left in its wake. We know a simple stillness, too.
I went home to my life and slowly made my way through the book (breaking the sacred rule of read the book first) and took my time with Strayed’s journey. Many times, I’ve instinctively known that I need time alone in the forest or the mountains or the desert, whatever is available to me, to heal what is broken. I know this. I always return home filled with what I needed.
Sometimes you need to walk alone and carry heavy things, only so you can reach a place of beauty and set the heavy things down.
And then, you will know forever that you did it and could do it again. It will always belong to you.
for my dear friend E.
a feast of crumbs 