The desert is growing. They said it like it was gnashing its teeth and going to eat us, like the buzzards coming and going were emissaries of a dark side, like the shimmering air in the distance was dripping of black magic. I pitied the desert when they called it a menace and drove away in their squeaky, old truck. If anything, we’re the insatiable ones. 

There is a difference between someone who climbs a mountain and someone who chooses to live on it. The climber reaches the summit and plants her flag, a record of fortitude and determination, an emblem of her bigness in the world. The citizen of the mountain, who has made a life six thousand feet above the rest of us, has flags as well, but they make no claim.

I have a favorite conversation with a friend in the city. It happens cyclically, seasonally, almost always after she’s survived a stint in bleating gridlocked traffic or a long spell of grey weather against grey buildings.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” she says, exasperated. “It’s too much. Too loud. Too busy.”

I’ve been walking with my father my entire life and long after his ended. I love him. I love him so much that he’s the tender earth, the laughter of particular birds, the moon and sun’s needless squabble over the sky in the last true minutes of morning. I love him so much that I started walking, by chance or design, on his birthday.

In this journey, I have shed many things that defined me. It has been scary. And hard. And sad. And wobbly. But I had my walking practice. Or it had me. Held me. Loved me. Honored the space I needed. I walked and walked and walked into the arms of the earth and into me. This me.