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"If I couldn't find the trail before dark, I could wake tomorrow disoriented and desperate, without having even made any new miles; my loss of the PCT should have distressed me, but a new instinct led me forward. In this moment of despair I was refusing to stop fighting. I asked the mountains for some guidance, the strength to get myself out of here, and pulled wild power from within myself I'd never known I'd had.I was no longer following a trail.I was learning to follow myself."
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"A whale has nowhere to hide in a river."

"A toothless wolf is less dangerous than a fanged insect."

"Fish are small, but do not drown in the sea. Ships are big, but sink in the ocean."

"Sometimes the very things that we're expending our lives to sustain are the very things that are killing our ability to live. And against our blind and frequently raging protests, these are the very things that God let's die so that we can live."

"Adaptation is the key to survival."
Explore more quotes by Aspen Matis

"Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing - able - to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed [my mom] to help me, to take care of things for me - and to save me - but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it."

"Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album."

"I realized that no, no one would actually come to save or even stop me, I had absolutely no choice. The scale tipped: the moment not doing it became more difficult and unbearable than just doing it."

"Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity-a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I'd never needed to consider water before."

"I needed to begin respecting my own body's boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules."

"When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment-which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them."

"And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path " the one, natural, trodden way."

"I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw-the shame wasn't mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself."
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