Book review: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

After hearing Cheryl Strayed speak last fall, I knew I wanted to read more of her work, and especially her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed was one of those speakers who, through her own depth of vulnerable sharing, quickly makes you reflect on how you might live a more authentic version of your own life. I knew that the journey recounted in Wild wasn't the only foundation for her insights and wisdom, but it seemed like a big piece of it, and I was intrigued.

I hesitated back then because the book spends not just a little time talking about how Strayed experienced and processed her mother's death from cancer; I was in the midst of my mom's final months of life and then processing her death from cancer, and I couldn't really handle reading about those things too. Recently I felt more ready for it, and though it was still hard at times, I'm glad I dove in.

Wild is a pure and beautiful telling of a rough and uncertain journey.

I say pure because Strayed has no agenda to pursue, no world view to push, no unifying message to hammer us with; it's just her story in all of its ups and downs, joy and fear, resistance and risk-taking. In some ways, it's just her taking a long walk. On the reason that humans create such experiences for themselves, she writes:

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 be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

I say beautiful because the language and narrative tone are so good at bringing us into the moment and letting us feel along with the author each surprise, disappointment and victory along the way. There is poetry in her descriptions of the landscape, and she makes the sights and sounds of the places she visited and the people she encountered come alive. In her toughest moments we can feel the anxiety, worry or frustration, and when her body is worn down by her gear or her pace, we can feel our own heavy loads just as acutely.

I say rough and uncertain not only because that's Strayed's experience of the Pacific Crest Trail as she hiked it, but because of all the rough edges in her story that are woven in to the larger fabric of this trip. Relationships, friendships, family dynamics, poverty, drug addiction, sexuality, body image, self care, excessive consumerism, rape culture, our experience of the natural world, finding comfort in silence -- these topics and more are all along for the ride and explored well. In the same way that Strayed never quite knew where her campsite would be along the trail each night, we never quite know what such an intense journey of exploration will bring out on a given day, and this brought its own kind of suspense to the story.

But over the miles the roughness is smoothed out and clarity, strength and resolve seep in. We find ourselves rooting for Strayed not only to hit her progress goals on the trail, but also to find what she is looking for inside, and in her life. When we worry about her, it's not just that her hiking boots are wearing out or that a bear might ruin her day, but that she might step away from being true to herself in all the ways she has discovered how to be.

The end result is so satisfying, and it's not hard to see why Wild became a bestselling memoir and then a major motion picture. The feeling of reading it is still with me days after finishing, and I'm grateful to Cheryl Strayed for bringing us along on such a intimately transformative adventure.

Northwest Living

Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel's immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way.

I can't agree enough with this quote by Ralph Crawshaw.  I am always fed by seeing the world from the different perspectives that come with traveling around it, being temporarily away from the routines, habits and comforts of my home.  Indeed, many of my best life choices and decisions have sprung from the thinking and reflecting that I've done while experiencing some other part of the country or the world, engaging in new conversations and reacting to new landscapes. I've often had my notion of "the right and only way" challenged and redefined by seeing how others live, work and play.  I'm appreciative of the privilege to have had these experiences.

I'm currently having another one.  For several weeks this summer, I'll be spending time in Portland, Oregon and in other areas of the northwestern U.S.

The trip is a combination of professional development, research in community building and city governance, and personal adventure and reflection.  Because a number of friends and colleagues have asked me about the trip, I thought I'd say a little more about these three areas of focus.

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My political aspirations

Update March 2011: I'm currently a candidate for election to Richmond's City Council.

At a local business networking event tonight, someone noted that they'd heard a rumor I might be getting involved in politics locally.  We had a good conversation about it, and I thought I'd use it as a jumping off point to share a little more about my own political aspirations.

Sometime during my college experience, I decided that I was going to run for the Presidency of the United States of America.  I was mostly serious. I mean, I announced it on the Internet for crying out loud, so you know I wasn't just messing around.  I figured out that I would be old enough to be elected President in the 2012 elections, and I dreamed my dream from there.

I've since figured out that national politics is probably not for me, at least not anytime soon.

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The role of travel in establishing expertise

008_18.JPGAt a recent training I attended, some foofaraw was made about the fact that the facilitators had come all the way from Boulder, Colorado to Indiana to share their knowledge and expertise with us.  Those facilitators in turn made some note of the fact that their knowledge and expertise was derived from their own trip to meet with others at a training in the UK, and from some other journeys that they'd taken involving significant travel.

Around the same time I noted a historical reference to a 1959 headline in the Earlhamite, "Southern religious leader visits Earlham."  It was about a then only mildly well known Martin Luther King, Jr. visiting the College and speaking at the Meetinghouse there.  Being a religious leader from the South surely had different connotations then than it does now, but I was still struck by the headline's focus on the origin and destination of the speaker, less on his message or credentials.

Ever since, I've been thinking about the role that travel plays in establishing credibility and expertise for someone when they come to speak or teach on a given topic.

Continue reading "The role of travel in establishing expertise"

Moments in Balance

The boy, trying to ignore the reoccurring dull pain in his left side, brought his hands together in front of his face, and held them there, barely touching. He moved his index fingers together and smiled at the brief moment before they touched, when each seemed to gently reach out to the other, attracting and pulling and melting into the moment of contact.

The girl, several hundred miles away and an hour from the nearest hospital, dropped her shovel and fell back into the sand screaming in terror from the pressure in her skull. Even when mommy scooped her up and held her tight and told her it would be okay, she could not stop screaming. She cried because it hurt and she did not understand.

The old woman ran her fingers over the smooth cover of the book on her bedside table, comforted at its presence though she could not see its pages. She had always had books near her, as a mother, as a teacher, and as a grandmother, and now she wanted to have one ready to read as soon as she got her strength back. She sighed at hearing the birds outside her window eating from the feeder down below, wishing she could see them, imagining that she did. She wondered if any of the friends or family who had come to say goodbye would remember to fill it again.

The old man nodded his head slowly as he was led past his wife's casket. He briefly ran his fingers over its (almost inappropriately) shiny wood surface, not so long as to acknowledge fully this loss, but just long enough to say "I know you don't belong in there." After sixty-five years together in a world such as this, it did not seem possible that he was breathing while she was not. He thought about how much work there was to do, and how he just wanted to take a nap, wondering if she would be there when he awoke.

The boy glanced up only briefly at his mother, but then back to the dashboard, and then out the windshield to the car in front of them. Briefly, the flashing of the other car's turn signal again came in sync with the clicking noise coming from their own, but then quickly went off into its own cycle. Why not make all car turn signals click with the same rhythm? He giggled quietly at the (somehow unsatisfying) answer to his question as he pictured a great, unified clicking noise on all the streets of all the world. Then, the car turned and it was quiet again.

The girl thought about her father's answer to her question as they kept walking: "Because he is a bad man, and he doesn't deserve it." He hadn't looked like a bad man. He had startled them a bit and he looked kind of dirty, but mostly he looked tired and hungry, sitting in that doorway covered in his blankets and newspapers. The girl could not know about the "bad" man's lung cancer, or that he could only sleep in that doorway because it was Sunday, or that she would be startled by quite a few more like him in her lifetime. But she quietly decided that she would have given him some money, if she had any. So what if he didn't deserve it?

The man tried to look deeply into his wife's sad and cautious eyes, but with every word he spoke he realized more that the depth he sought would have to be recreated rather than rediscovered. The horror would never quite leave him, that he had somehow justified a few moments of unworthy pleasure for this numbing pain he had brought into their marriage. As he looked at the woman he loved - perhaps more so than he loved himself? - he promised that, if she could forgive him, he would learn how to love all over again.

The woman laughed beautifully and fully as she tried to cover her husband in the leaves they had gathered, ignoring the itching against her skin and the damp cold on her fingers. They tossed each other around gently and finally lay side by side in the messy pile they had created. They drew close as she wrapped her arm around his chest and he put his hand in the small of her back. She looked intently up at the rounded space of his neck, wondering if she could curl up in that space and go to sleep. She had told him that she forgave him many times, and they had oddly never stopped saying "I love you." But it was only now that she fully appreciated the intensity and depth of the love with which they had covered each other, the forgiveness and pain inherent in it, and the contentment of knowing that it would survive and shape them forever.

With the noise of the reception now off in the distance, the man and the woman, the boy and the girl, stood facing each other, hands raised and each with palms nervously but firmly pressed against the other's. It was a perfect darkness and the temperature let them forget about their skin and their balance and their mass. They looked deeply, smiling at the joy of this night and of these several years together. Each wondered how they met, how this moment came to be, and each looked for signs about what it would mean to spend the rest of their lives together. As their faces neared, each seemed to gently reach out to the other, attracting and pulling and melting into the moment of contact. Moments before the physical touch, another kind of touch that explains everything engulfed them both.