About nine years ago, in the unmoored months after someone dear to me died, when I found myself quite literally needing to feel the ground beneath my feet, I began to hike.

In the beginning, I approached these hikes from a need to move through difficult energy. With headphones streaming music into my ears from the time I laced up my hiking boots to the moment I took them off, I experienced the time on the trail as a time to be lost in my own thoughts. I saw the whole process as a nice venue for exercise, and at best, as a means to get something, such as relief from a stressful afternoon at my laptop, some sensory delight, some proprioceptive stimulation.

I unconsciously related to the land as something from which to extract benefits.

But as my reliance on my ritual of hiking these trails deepened, the experience itself began to transform.