Wild (Oprah's Book Club 2.0 Digital Edition): From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for 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

“Oh I could drink a case of youuuuu, darling, and I would still be on my feet,” I crooned loudly.

I’m a slow walker, but I never walk back. ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.O

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn’t embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wi

In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange but true.

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.

To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

“Do I love you this much?” she’d ask us, holding her hands six inches apart. “No,” we’d say, with sly smiles. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask again, and on and on and on, each time moving her hands farther apart. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It coul