hiking

Trekking means a travelling experience with a thrilling excitement.

I'm into outdoor sports like hiking, windsurfing, water-skiing.

Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.

There is of course a deep spiritual need which the pilgrimage seems to satisfy, particularly for those hardy enough to tackle the journey on foot.

Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.

I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.

If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad__f I could say yes and also no, as if it were the law__t would become my law.

.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

We aren__ afraid of what we can explain.But the truth is stranger than an aimless road, it always was. The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to truth of what they were. There were things about the world I couldn__ understand.

Though I was starved for contact, I didn__ stop to talk to any of these strangers. I had forgotten how to convincingly speak the polite things strangers say to each other.

He understood. In lovesickness we had found a common language.

Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness.

I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

Maybe I'd die. Maybe I'd burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I'd add one to the count. I didn't feel scared. I didn't think to panic. The trail wasn't burning. I was raw, ripe for loving. I wasn't stopping.

I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains____ mastered a thousand amazing physical feats__hysically I__ become undeniably confident and capable__ut physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature.

When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment__hich is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them.

The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape__y word. The subsequent silencing and exile__isplaced shame__ere the catalysts for me to finally break free of my mother's grasp and my voicelessness and do what I truly wanted, alone. I wished to prove myself as independent and valid and strong__o my mother, and to the world. I'd believed I had needed something huge and external that no one could deny was impressive, so I could show my family I was able__o they could finally know that I was strong.Instead I had shown myself.And it felt wonderful.

I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself.