Stop asking yourself what you want, what you desire, what interests you. Ask yourself instead: What has been given to me? Ask: What do I have to give… - Cheryl Strayed

Perhaps being among the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I, too, could be undesecrated...the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

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

I never got to be in the driver’s seat of my own life,” she’d wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. “I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.” “Oh, Mom,” was all I could say as I stroked her hand. I was too young to say anything else.