Before I keep another book in a shelf, as my not- so- rigid habit, here are the quotes and lines that I highlighted which caught my sentimental side. The book is titled Wild (From Lost to Found On The Pacific Crest Trail) by Cheryl Strayed, a nonfiction novel by the author describing her journey of more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from California and Oregon to Washington State, alone.
"I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake. "
"You should see a therapist, everyone had told me after my mother died, and ultimately- in the depths of my darkest moments the year before the hike- I had. But I didn't keep the faith. .. I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.
"Anyway, after all that stuff about my son getting killed? After that happened, I died too. Inside." She patted her chest with the hand that held the cigarette., " I look the same, but I'm not the same in here. I mean, life goes on and all that crap, but Luke dying took it out of me. I try not to act like it, but it did. It took the Lou out of Lou, and I ain't getting it back. You know what I mean?"
" I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right."
" Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller."
" Maybe I was more than alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay."
" There were so many other things amazing in this world. They opened inside of me like a river. Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. "
" I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too."
" She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again."
" She did. She'd come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love."
" My love for him was indisputable, but my allegiance to him wasn't."
" For once I didn't ache for a companion. For once the phrase a woman with a hole in her heart didn't thunder into my head. That phrase, it didn't even live for me anymore."
" There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. "
" He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered."
" 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."
The author inserted this thought-provoking line in one of the pages:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
Wild. Free. Life.
