At the encouragement of readers, and perhaps against my better judgment, I’ll be sharing more of my journal entries from the wild.
This one is for the wounded, for the damaged, for anyone carved with scar tissue, literal or emotional. You know who you are. You are the soldiers, the survivors, the keepers of secrets, the pretenders, the unsung heroes, the unrequited lovers, the quiet voices of sanity. You, who know that honor and pain and sacrifice are rewarded not with medals but with the simple feat of being at peace with yourself. You, who are repaid by seeing others prosper from your labors. You, who have been through hell, who have come to realize the truth and found that it was not what you were told to believe and had the mettle to start over.
Let me tell you about the bonds between soldiers that no one else can understand, about the pain of yearning, the loneliness of the brave, the invisibility of altruism, the haunting silence of the departed, and the importance of fear. Let me tell you about the lies of war, about the memories that will never go away, about the emptiness, the regrets, the doubts, the sleepless nights, the love that was and the love that will never be and the love that remains. Then again, if you’ve been there yourself – you already know.
Take it from a soldier, a drifter, a man living borrowed lives. Take it from a courageous coward, a spiritual atheist, a hopeful fatalist, a sociable recluse, a militant pacifist. Take if from me – there is a place where it all makes sense, a place where all the truths and lies and misconceptions converge and resolve, where all the man-made chaos dissolves into a clear, consistent, meaningful existence; a place where the literal and spiritual coexist as equals, a place where you can safely break down and put yourself together again and come away healed; a place where you can summon ghosts, where you can relive the pain unharmed, where you can forgive… yourself.
For some it may be the peaks of mountains, or ancient forests, or anonymous trails in foreign lands. For me, it is the deserts and plateaus of the American Southwest. For any troubled soul there is a place in the wild, a place of solitude and peace and natural order, unlike any city, and exactly because it is unlike any city.