First, there was finishing the first draft: the messy, shitty collection of words that I looked at and wondered how it would ever become a book. I said the word book, rolled it around in my mouth like a sip of full-bodied wine. It wasn’t a real thing yet, just a dream I’d been chasing, but I trusted I’d know it when I felt it. I told all my family and friends I finished the first draft, which the next day felt premature. My mother’s sweet friend sent me twenty dollars tucked into a card that said YOU ARE AWESOME, but I didn’t feel awesome, not yet. My so-called book was still just a jumble of letters. By then I’d only learned one thing about books: to write a book is to walk in the dark.

So I kept walking.

The second draft was where it came together. I put the scrappy little drafts I’d been passing back and forth with my editor into one big document: 80,000 words. Two-hundred and sixty-nine pages. It had the heft of a bird cupped in my hand, beating her still-developing wings against my palms. She wasn’t ready to fly yet, but she had a body and a heartbeat. I sent her to my four best readers: a former MFA mentor, two writer friends I’ve been deep in the book-writing trenches with for almost ten years, and a comedian from Chicago who delivered me an “accessibility read” from the perspective of a Midwestern grandmother named Darlene. When you write a book for ten years it takes on many voices, and some of them can get a little grand. I really don’t want to be grand. I just want to be good company.

When I got my readers’ notes back, I buzzed with energy. They pointed out the holes I need to fill and the strings I need to pull tight, but all four of them could see it. You’ve done it, they said, wiping tears. I started to believe it myself.

“I did it!” I told people again.

“I thought you already did?” they said.

A moment of silence for all the things I’ve let go by the wayside. This is an incomplete list:

• The dirty dishes in my sink.

• My un-scrubbed toilet.

• The full-time job with the co-workers I loved that I quit so I could finish this book (RIP).

• The daffodils and bumblebees in the yard I’ve been too busy to notice.

• The insurance paperwork, and the unanswered emails, and the kind people over at EZ-Pass who wrote to let me know my credit card has expired.

• My people, for their patient love. For letting me be where I am. For understanding why “no” has, by necessity, become my favorite word.

• My body, who carried me into early mornings and late nights. Who sat for days, and sometimes weeks, without enough exercise or vegetables. Who let me eat and drink whatever it took to stay in the chair. Who danced solo in the kitchen. Who wrapped her arms around me in bed when I was starved for touch.

• My heart, my heart, for loving this book into the world.

Yesterday, I turned in the third draft.

I didn’t realize how much I’d been asking for help. Not from people. Every time I sat down to write, I’d light a candle and whisper a prayer: Help me, help me, help me. Sing through me. Help me do this. It’s time.

In the last 48 hours, I’d done almost nothing but write. I barely ate. Sometimes, if I put on the right music, I could forget I was writing and ride the wave. I pulled the closest thing to an all-nighter since college. My back hurt from sitting in my chair for so long, so I did a lot of writing in bed. There was something about leaning back on the pillows, cocooned in my warm comforter, that allowed me to surrender to the flow. I typed and I typed and I scribbled down notes to come back to later for draft four. Once, I drifted off to sleep and dreamt my water broke. It’s my book, I thought, like this was a perfectly normal thing to think. I woke up and kept writing.

Then, at one point in the middle of the night, something happened. It felt as if my book was fixing itself. Paragraphs fell into place like puzzle pieces. Sections that moments ago had felt un-writeable because of how personal and scary they were flowed out of my fingers and onto the page. I was no longer alone in that room. It was me and something holy. I’d been asking it for help, and it came. It took me in its arms and we made something.

Noticing

Bless the Foolish Ideas

In this week’s episode, we speak to Jenny O’Connell, a woman who has always lived in the world with her entire body. She is a writer, naturalist, outdoor guide, ultimate frisbee player, and fierce lover of the world who reminds us to leap. What feels remarkable about this conversation is how many times Jenny had faith in her life…

Listen now

2 months ago · 1 like · Noticing

What happens when a small, bright thing whizzes by and you grab it by the tail? What happens if you keep holding on? Who do you have to be to do this, and who do you become after it sets you back down?

This April, in the throes of finishing the second draft of my book (which is in my editor’s hands as of 10pm last night!), I took an afternoon off writing to appear on my first podcast, Noticing, in conversation with my friends Christina Watka and Becky DiCecco.

When I showed up to our recording, I’d just quit my full-time job to give the book all of my energy. I was crispy from writing nonstop for months. Dirty dishes were piled up in my sink. I was tipping at the edge writers of books do—the one where the story shaping itself beneath your hands ceases to be yours and enters the collective. Where it goes from bouncing around your insides to shimmering outside of you, a separate being with its own soul.

I am ten and a half years into writing this book. It has forged me into the human I am, and given me a book deal with a major publisher and a bunch of fancy titles on my resumé. But it all started with a small, bright thing. A wild idea that I was foolish enough to listen to. That version of me had a lot to learn, but I have a lot to learn from her, too. These days when I feel a tug behind my bellybutton, my intuition saying this way, I close my eyes, put one hand on my heart and one on my belly, and thank her.

In this Noticing podcast, we talk about this inner authority, and how to feel it, listen to it, and act on it. We talk about the forces trying to tame our bodies and the land, and why it’s essential for us to take back our own wildness. We talk about what it means to be in conversation with our lives, our deep knowing, and our power, and the joy and connection that awaits us when we are. We talk about mending a broken relationship to time, and how holy it is to simply notice this one wild life. To let it touch you.

I hope you’ll give it a listen.

There’s nothing extraordinary about reaching for wildness. It’s right there.

You just have to grab it by the tail.

When I take the subway the right way on my first try, I feel gratuitously proud of myself. I scuttle behind the real New Yorkers who cross the street against the light. I have four items of clothing in my wardrobe that feel New York appropriate and they all require the same pair of pants. In my hotel room I change my shirt with the window shades open, forgetting that even though my room is on the eleventh floor, someone else’s is, too. It thrills me a little, if I’m being honest.

At the Italian joint around the corner, I order a glass of wine I can’t pronounce and the simplest pasta on the menu. I want to slow down, to taste it without anything fancy getting in between us. The wine is what an expert would call full-bodied, and I smile at that, me and my full body, full of resonance and dreams and joy. Isn’t this what I can never stop writing about—cracking life open between my fingers and sucking out the marrow? Is there anything more wild than pleasure?

I have forgotten my notebook again. I want to ask the waiter for a pen and some napkins, but this isn’t the pub on the corner in Maine. It doesn’t seem like the place where you do that. So, I type it all into my phone under the table like I’m cheating on a high school exam, and when the waiter comes back I toss the phone down as if I wasn’t, and it feels fun, like I’m breaking a rule, even though everyone in New York is on their cell phone all the time. It’s actually probably the most New York I’ll be on this trip.

A plate comes with one slice of bread on it. One! It is accompanied by another smaller plate with olive oil, vinegar, and cheese. I may not be rich in money, but I am rich in plates. Next is a bigger plate with hazelnut orange radicchio drizzled in hot honey, broccolini with pine nuts and juicy yellow raisins, and onion truffle gratin. I have to Google gratin. I thought it was a potato.

I know that there are eight hundred shades of New Yorks and many are darker and some are even brighter than this, but this is the New York I get tonight, and I am open and ready to receive it. I am awake. Awake to the man stacking cans on the grocery store shelf; he sets them down so gently. Awake to the driver parked in the intersection, grooving to music with his windows down. The little girl and her mother wearing matching black sparkle shirts. The woman at the bar, alone like me, her head bowed in deep conversation with the bartender. My red-purple lipstick on the white napkin.

When I went for a walk the other day back in Maine, I asked the ocean why my writing felt slow and blocked. What came back was that I needed to raise my resonance. If you do that, the ocean said, it all could happen quite quickly. I asked if maybe we could hurry it up a little. My book deadline is at the end of February. The ocean just laughed.

Here’s what I’m learning: resonance is the level at which we are vibrating on the inside. I raise mine by connecting to source—pressing my hand against a tree and feeling the tree joyfully leaning back. Breathing in the electric pause when someone says something so true everyone’s stomach drops a level. Asking myself a question and trusting the answer. It’s a matter of how connected I am to myself, to the earth, and to you. It’s about honoring the current that runs through all of us. It’s not about the spaghetti. It’s about noticing the spaghetti so much that it fills me until I’m buzzing. It’s about being alive enough to taste it.

And if being alive means being awake to pleasure, it also means being awake to rage.

Last week, I sat down and tried to write straight to the place where my rage lives. Rage is hard for me; I’m always trying to turn it into beauty. I was surprised to learn that my rage lives in my womb. I don’t have children, but in my womb, I hold the earth and its children. I hold the girls I have mentored, and the girl I used to be. I hold my neighbors who are getting torn away from their families and terrorized by ICE. I hold the world’s wars. I even hold the politicians with their twisted ideas of right and wrong, of natural and unnatural, who have strayed so far from their hearts and souls. Yes, them. The fuckers who go to work every day and try to sign away my rights. This surprises me the most. I love them—not in their current form, but their highest selves that got lost, the parts I hope they will someday return to. Because if we really are all connected, then to hate them is to hate myself.

It’s not just the politicians, either. We live in a culture where those in power need us to be dim inside in order to stay in power. As a child I had such magic in me, such knowing. I was connected to water, rocks, trees, and mountains. I breathed in sky. I was wind and dirt, bloody knees and wild laughter. They tried to make me hate my body. They tried to control me. They tried to tame me. And for a while, they succeeded. I let in the fear they were pedaling and sold that girl out for a hollower version of myself.

Call it what you want: Resonance. Magic. Life-force energy. God. The reason I write about reclaiming wildness is that each of us has a flame within us that, when lit, is too powerful for someone else to control.

I’ve noticed something happening lately, and not just to me. It’s happening to a lot of people. As the world grows darker, I grow brighter. Not in an ignorant way. Because of the dark. In response to the dark. I am an aurora trying to fit into woman form.

Why write about resonance when the world is burning?

Because our resistance needs resourcing. It needs people who are lit. Because we need to feel in our bones what’s worth building toward. If this is my way of tipping the balance, I will throw all of my weight behind it.

(Jenny, you are saying. I thought this was an essay about spaghetti.)

The pomodoro comes, handmade noodles and a spoon. I have never used a pasta spoon and I don’t start now. I let the pasta hit my chin. It’s got five kinds of goddamn tomatoes, it’s allowed to go wherever it wants. Except on my pants; I need those tomorrow.

The cannolis have a chocolate medallion engraved with the name of the restaurant and it’s so over the top it makes me laugh out loud. The waiter brings a clean fork but I eat them with my hands and lick the cream off my fingers. Cannolis are a silly thing to eat with a fork. I save one sip of wine for the very end.

Outside the restaurant, people are walking fast and I go very, very slow. I take a picture of an old green door. I take a picture of the sky, framed by skyscrapers. I take a picture of the bronze butt in the restaurant doorway. Isn’t this what it’s all about? I am unembarrassed, a tourist in a strange town. I walk back to the hotel, turning circles the whole way home.

Tonight, everything feels resonant.

Everything feels new.

Placing my attention and awareness in tiny joys knits my life together in a way that connects me to my humanity. To sparks. To the life force that sings through all of us. To wild places. To joyfire.

Drink some water. Hug somebody. Maybe get yourself a joy calendar. I love you.

If the revolution is built on things worth protecting, then let me be a garden. Let us all be.

— Jenny

I am known for being ravenous to live.

I’m obsessed with aliveness. Always have been. That’s the gift of growing up with an older parent: you feel mortality breathing down your neck all of your days, feel time streaming through your fingers, and you remember that all any of us have is this life and what we do with it.

Sometimes this is a bad thing, or at least an annoying one. The people who tend to stick around understand that my tendency to leap before I think, to pursue too many activities at once (rarely have I had fewer than three jobs at a time), and to love this world so hard it makes me tired is just part of how I’m built. I am exhausting, chaotic, and perpetually late. “When you learn to focus your energy, to point it at something instead of letting it spill out everywhere,” an outdoor program director I guided with once said, “you’re going to be unstoppable.” But it’s taken me until my late thirties to learn how to do that, and I’ve lived for decades on the edge of burnout, rarely crossing the line but always close.

Burning to live can also be a good thing. It shunted me away from a predictable career and into a life full of wild places, creativity, and desire. For much of the last sixteen years, as an outdoor guide and then an outdoor writer, my hair has been windswept and tangled. Permanent dirt has lived underneath my fingernails. I’ve brimmed with joy.

It’s also led me to take wild risks, like meeting an 89-year-old woman on her deathbed and upending my life to walk across Finland in her legendary footsteps. That same life-force energy is how I’ve maintained the verve and staying power to write my book about that journey over the last ten years.

This is the intense side of aliveness. There’s a soft side, too. And I think that’s what I need right now.

I got a lesson in ferocity this fall. The first half of my book was due the beginning of November and I tried to write it while keeping in step with the rest of my life, which was almost impossible. I wrote it in a tent in Acadia National Park while my students dozed before dawn. I wrote it on a train, and in the backseat of a car with the family dog pressed up against my leg. I wrote it at a bar with Halloween trivia roaring around me. I wrote it in the early mornings and late at night. I took a week off from work and wrote it by the fire in a cottage near the ocean where I rarely showered and barely slept. I have never been so focused on anything. And there it came, weaving itself together beneath my hands, the most honest and scary and exciting thing I’ve ever written.

But then I turned it in, and the fire—no longer needed—went out. I spent some time with family. I got sick and used my cold as a reason to cancel all plans and retreat from the world. I binged three seasons of Bridgerton over the course of a week, which if you know me, is out of character. (I don’t even own a T.V.) Now, the rest of my book is due at the end of February, and I’m in trouble if I don’t find a way to light that fire again. (My editor is reading this; Alex, don’t panic.)

When I started Wild Story, I promised you just one thing: to give you my full presence. To never write anything without my whole self behind it. It’s a little funny, in this world of ours, to be a writer. As if the rollercoaster of the publishing industry wasn’t enough, people are using A.I. to rip off memoirs and sell fake imitations that Amazon publishes next to the real titles earned with sweat and time and probably some kind of therapy. Can you imagine writing a book for a decade and then finding a computer-generated ripoff of the contents of your insides? Jesus fucking christ.

But here’s the thing: bots don’t burn to live.

I’ve been more bot-like lately than I care to admit. I’m taking myself too seriously. I don’t dance, not even around the kitchen. I wake up at 5:30 to spend the morning writing my book on a computer, and then I go to work from the same desk on a different computer. Add my phone to the mix, and the younger version of me who spent all of her time outside shudders to think how much screen time I’m getting. I dream of putting on a backpack and going for a long walk. I dream of guiding expeditions again. Every time I write about my outdoor skills I feel like a sham because I haven’t used them in way too long. Can I even claim them anymore? I’m hungry for the living world.

I’m also afraid of my own ferocity. It burned me this fall. I loved the feeling of finishing the first half, but it hurt. I came out the other side depleted, exhausted. Why would I want to put my hand in that fire again? Or, more importantly: how do I convince myself to do it again? To choose the hard thing?

Where does one find the bravery to burn?

Portland, Maine right now is covered in four inches of snow. I went for a walk in the forest along the Presumpscot River. The moment I stepped under the lacy cover of hemlocks and saw the golden winter light, the river slipping quietly by, I heard the trees say, there you are. They were almost smug, as if amused that I had forgotten them yet again. This is my whole life: forgetting and then coming back.

I went up the trail wonder-crying, feeling the soft side of aliveness. The world, waiting for me to notice it. The silence was broken only by my footsteps in snow and my own surprised laughter as I filled myself back up. Enough, perhaps, to light a fire.

The cathedral filled with Gregorian chant, soft and tremulous, and low, colorful light. Singers holding wavering candles stood behind us in a row, surrounding us with music. The concert, called Antidote, was dreamed up by my friend Emily Isaacson, Artistic Director of Classical Uprising, to be a balm for fast and fractured times, a bath of light and sound. Around me, people closed their eyes to soak it in. Then, something unexpected happened.

I turned to look at the sopranos behind me and instead, my eyes locked with a stranger’s a few rows back. I knew at once that my face must look exactly like his, both of us smiling, eyes bright. He did not break his gaze, and so I held it. It was the longest eye contact I’ve made with anybody in a very long time. No awkwardness. No embarrassed blush. We passed the threshold of acceptable and kept going. I will leave here knowing someone, I remember thinking. The man and I wouldn’t find each other after the concert to acknowledge what had happened. I will probably never see him again, or if I do run into him on the street, I won’t know it. We were just two people, fully present, inhabiting the moment.

Connection is holy. Especially now.

I’ve got an op ed in my heart that I need to write. The argument goes like this: Nobody is going to sufficiently regulate AI. It’s up to each of us to decide how alive we want to be. It’s up to us to know if the art we consume was made by a beating heart, or not. It’s up to us to recognize each other.

I remember when smartphones became widely available. It was the early 2000s and I was teaching outdoor education and living in a park just outside of San Francisco with dry hills that crackled with coyote song and coastal sage. A place where wet, salty air soaked into your clothes, where bell buoys rang on the ocean and the sweep of stars over the Pacific at night were enough to open you. That place marked me in ways I am still discovering, but one thing’s for sure—living with one foot in a city and one foot in a wild place made me notice things differently.

I saw how the adult chaperones always had one hand on their phones, how they tiptoed around the coyote brush as if they didn’t belong. How the bus downtown grew quieter as people stopped talking and disappeared into their screens. I held out for as long as I could. My little brick of a flip phone was indestructible, good for playing shuffleboard at closing time when the bouncer took the pucks away. My hack when I got lost was to call the Ithaca College info desk, where there was always a bored undergrad waiting to answer my questions. Can you tell me what time Step Up 3D is playing at the Metreon in San Francisco? I’d ask. Can you tell me how to get there from 4th and Brannan?

But eventually, convenience won out and I got one, too.

Are you like me? Do you thumb through your emails instead of looking around you? Do you feel a buzz in your pocket during dinner and lose your train of thought? I’m not naïve enough to believe tech will roll itself back (in fact, the opposite seems true), but I wish we would be wilder about it. I want us to sometimes opt for the messier, harder way. To remember the joy that lies on the other side of the discomfort of connecting with someone in real life.

That’s been my promise to myself lately. To try.

What if I told you I wrote this whole Wild Story with a borrowed pen on restaurant postcards the bartender kept bringing me when I ran out of room? By the end we were laughing, and he was asking about my writing. He might be reading this right now.

What if I told you that a few weeks ago, when I realized I was in over my head working full time and teaching and trying to meet my first book deadline, and I had a pile of overdue work and 78 unread texts (if you’re one of them, I’m sorry) and I dearly needed an oil change and a dentist and about thirty other tiny annoying things (“It is as it must be,” Mary Oliver wrote in Upstream. “The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame”), I did something I rarely ever do—I asked for help. Friends showed up with soup and chocolate and beeswax candles and fresh-baked bread; with gift cards and help with errands and bear hugs. And that made me remember my other community, the one that is there holding me every time I step outside, even when I forget: the grass, the bay, the ants, the moon, the trees shedding their changing leaves, the bees falling asleep in the pink and purple cosmos in my yard. I felt love in widening circles.

If I wrote this a year ago, it might have been well and good to leave it here. But now, our choice to connect with each other has real stakes. Fascism feeds on our silence. Dictators depend on our disconnection.

When I went to the No Kings rally yesterday, not only did I see four different people I connected with and then un-connected with via online dating (which, let’s be honest, will never not be awkward, though I’m glad I’m choosing the right kind of people); I saw 6,000 of my neighbors being kind to each other, carrying signs, dancing in blow-up unicorn and dinosaur costumes, sparking connections. Writing is a lonely act, and I am often one of the first to forget how not isolated I actually am. But showing up always, always works. And though protests and rallies alone won’t save us, what we do after—the ways we collaborate and lean into each other, the bonds we build—will.

We are here to connect with each other. We are here to be undone. We are here to be messy, and imperfect, and annoying, and loved. We are here to devour this life with two hands.

It’s not a hunker down and hold your people close kind of moment. It’s a reach your arms out as wide as they fucking go and see who’s out there reaching back kind of moment.

Your connection is holy. And we are the only way out.

I have been sharpening myself toward that sentence ever since.

Students at Stonecoast MFA were scared of Rick. At the time, he accepted no emails—you had to mail your manuscript to his house in rural Montana. One of my packets came back brown and crinkled because it had been dropped in a mud puddle next to his porch. He was fierce in his criticism, known for x-ing out whole pages, berating his workshop students for using too many adverbs, and occasionally suggesting that someone abandon a piece altogether. He also had the softest of hearts. Rick once delivered an entire graduation speech with a wriggling puppy tucked under his elbow (“for emotional support”). His writing simmers with love for this complicated world, and he has dedicated the later part of his career to using his way with words in defense of Montana’s Yaak Valley grizzlies and old growth trees.

He was seminal in my formation as a writer.

When I need to refocus (or when I need a good laugh), I flip through the early draft of my book with Rick’s barely-legible cursive in the margins. I need it right now. In the North, the last days of summer make us manic and feverish, and I am a people-loving human with porous boundaries who can’t say no to fun. Just the other day I drove home soaking wet after getting in a water balloon fight with six small children at a baby shower. But as much as I delight in summer tomatoes—how I miss them even as I’m tasting them!—and the impermanence of August slipping through my fingers in hot breezes and orange flowers and the smell of charcoal, this time of year I ache for the silence of winter, when people hibernate and the weather turns and it’s easy to sit behind a desk and write. (This is unpopular, I know.)

Cold weather is still far away, so this morning, I pulled it out again. The manuscript is from 2017, just three years after my journey across Finnish Lapland, and I had no idea what I was doing. I was trying things on, digressing (Rick’s least favorite thing), self-indulging, hiding my truths behind beautiful sentences. Be yr own writer, be yr own woman, Rick wrote after I started a chapter with a quote by someone else. When you use song lyrics in a book it just looks like bad poetry.

He circled a part where I sidestepped vulnerability by being funny: a mask over the heart, he wrote. Ok, he scribbled next to one paragraph, and then next to the one that directly followed: Not ok.

Dial this down, restrain, keep it, hold it in, that’s the power.

I suggest you focus. With ferocity.

I am thinking this morning about the quiet side of wildness. What it means to retreat from the bright and buzzing world, to go dark if that’s what you need to do, and trust people to still be there when you come back. How we each tend the flame inside of us, the life-force behind your sternum that blazes when you’re doing something so authentically you, but flickers and dims when there’s too much noise. What happens when we dial our energy inward, like a magnifying glass catching the sun.

How do we keep this part of ourselves lit at a time when the news keeps breaking and breaking? When collective fear spins around us, yelping to be fed? How do we hold onto our wildness, our agency, our power?

I have started with cutting the noise I can control: the dating apps, the extra emails and subscriptions. The things I’ve said yes to out of obligation or people-pleasing. I am intentionally choosing when and how I take in the news (aka not first thing in the morning when my dream-mind is sharp). And I am trying, as Rick has taught me, to focus with ferocity. To come back to the spine of my story.

The only way through this moment in history, I believe, is more people who are awake, connected, and wild. Who are tapped into their own focused power.

Rick and I are friends now, thank god. I think I get what he’s saying, finally, having lived nine more years with this story; the way it’s demanded I refresh my relationship with this earth and what it means to be alive on it. What it means to write the truth.

When I go walking, sometimes I leave myself gifts in the form of voice notes that I listen to later. In late July of this year, I went back to Finland for one more research trip before my book is due. In these recordings, I was wandering up on the fjelds of Lemmenjoki in a gathering storm. You can hear me cursing and laughing and running. Rain and thunder. Lemmenjoki is mostly sky. The storms are raw power.

I am also weeping.

When I ran out of thoughts, for the first time, I just let the recording roll. I left space for the land to come through. At first, it was just my footsteps and wind. Then, in a voice that wasn’t fully mine, I said: “Dissolve the barrier.”

There it is. The spine.

I can’t convince anyone of their own wildness. All I can do is point to the things that quicken our hearts, that bring us to the verge of tears, that open up space inside us. Things that remind us we are not separate from each other, or from the water we drink and the earth we walk on. Always, always the world is calling us back.

Right now, I need to source it for myself. To trust in grace, and let go. To tap in deep.

Restrain, keep it, hold it in, that’s the power.

Then, the path hit Highway 45. Tractor trailers drowned out the whisper of grass. A tangle of roads stretched into the flat, gray distance, choked with cars. I felt cold, and a bit dizzy, as if I’d just startled awake on a train and stepped off in a place I wasn’t supposed to be. At the intersection, I set my backpack on a wooden bench and took my map out of my pocket. The map was already ripping at the seams where I’d folded and unfolded it so many times. North was across the river.

I’d made it less than a kilometer. My shoulders were already tight from the weight I was carrying. My feet hurt. Mosquitos sank into my bare arms, my neck.

“Why the fuck am I walking across Finland?” I said out loud to no one. The fuck came out a sharp exhale, like I’d just been punched.

I hadn’t trained my body to walk 800 miles. I couldn’t speak Finnish. Things had gone haywire in Helsinki, my search for Petronella just leaving me with bigger questions, and now I was following a vague constellation of clues toward a remote wilderness I knew nothing about. This was the beginning, the real beginning, and suddenly I had lost my nerve.

I laugh at all the wrong times, like in the middle of a first kiss, or when a friend falls through the ice, or when I’m in danger. It’s a fear response. There on the riverbank, only a few steps away from where I started, I leaned against my backpack and I laughed. I laughed. And then, because nobody was around and I didn’t have to pretend anymore, I bent over and I wept.

When I look back, I will always remember that moment as beautiful, though it wasn’t. It was wretched, actually. I had stepped all the way over the edge and the dream had shattered. But there was the taste of wet asphalt in my throat. The sky, darkening to the East. There was the soggy hem of my pants, and the way I leaned into the road despite myself. The space, opening inside me.

I folded up the map and slid it back into my backpack. So what if this was all a huge mistake? All I wanted was to walk, to crack open. To shake up my life until it rang wild again. Until I stopped being so afraid.

Sometimes, the moments we are most alive do not feel good at all.

But alive was everything.

Alive was the whole damn point.

If you’re new here, or even if you’re not, let me introduce myself.

We live in a society that’s obsessed with credentials, so here are mine: I’m an adventure and outdoor writer, wilderness guide, environmental storyteller, and professor of creative writing. Most importantly, I am a woman who’s obsessed with living her life like she’s alive.

The excerpt you just read is from the first draft of my forthcoming adventure memoir, Wildheart. (This is the first time I’ve gotten to type the word “forthcoming.” I’m kind of losing my mind.) I chose that one to share because it was a leap into a new beginning. Like now.

The thing about credentials is that you never start out with them. I’ve gotten here by living fiercely in the direction of whatever it is that lights me up. When I began walking North that day from Helsinki, the only credentials I had were “fairly inexperienced outdoor guide” and “woman who took one writing class in the city and became obsessed.” I’d gone to one writers’ conference, during which I’d had an entire conversation with Gary Snyder without the faintest idea of who he was; and gotten rejected from a handful of MFA programs (of course I did! I didn’t know how to write!). I was calling myself a writer, hoping that it would eventually make me one.

The plan was always to write a book about my journey across Finland, but I didn’t know what that meant, not really. I told my friends and family and Kickstarter supporters it’d be done in a year. I figured I would send them a pdf, or something I printed out and bound in a plastic cover like a third grade book report. Never in my wildest dreams did me of 2014 imagine that I would still be writing this book a decade later; that the process of writing it would grow me into the writer—and the human—I was meant to become. Never could I have guessed that I would sign with an agent and end up publishing with a multinational imprint of Penguin Random House. Nope, nope, nope.

I signed the book deal last week.

Sometimes, the way we become is by finding the gaps.

When I met Petronella van der Moer on her deathbed in 2013 and learned of her legendary 1949 adventure across Finland’s Arctic Circle, deep down in a place beyond words I recognized that I’d just touched something I badly needed. Petronella was bold and free in ways that I could only dream of. A wild part of myself had gone missing a long time ago. I set out on that journey to get her back.

On one level, Wildheart tells the true story of my solo 800-mile journey of self-discovery following Petronella’s footsteps into the wilderness of Finnish Lapland. There were challenges, dangers, and plot twists: Lyme disease, freak thunderstorms, moose in the underbrush, Finns who rallied to help me when I lost my way (which was often). I competed in the Finnish National Goldpanning Championships, ate reindeer, sweated in more saunas than I could count, slept in a tiny wooden cabin by the river. I shoveled with the Lemmenjoki gold prospectors in their claims and listened to their stories. We scattered Petronella's ashes across the barren, rolling fjelds that she loved. I backpacked 116 kilometers into the wilderness on Petronella’s trail with a stranger I met on a riverbank. Called Petronella's name into the wind. Followed her ghost across a country.

None of this is what took ten years to write. It’s one thing to tell a good story. It’s another to understand its heart.

It actually took launching Wild Story to find that.

For the rock climbers out there: if Wildheart is the whole wall, Wild Story is bouldering. It’s where I come to work things out, to sharpen my voice, and to surprise myself with the things I believe but never consciously knew. It’s about connection, and curiosity—I never know when I sit down what I’m going to say. I write without a publication in mind, or any other voice in my head. It’s just you, right here (thank you), keeping me honest.

Writing these two things alongside each other has crystallized my understanding of what I’m here to do: To remind us all (myself included) that we are alive, tender, awake, and connected. That our joy belongs to us. That we don’t get to live on this planet for long. And that staying wild in this world is a conscious choice.

It feels strange and dissonant to be bringing Wildheart into the world during a time of tech-fueled disconnection and rising authoritarianism, when natural spaces and human rights in the United States are under attack. But the more this book arrives on the page, the more I realize that this is exactly when she is supposed to be born. It’s an experience of deep joy and humanity; an immersive journey through nature; a call to the wild spirit; a reminder that we can step outside of the broken systems and beliefs that don’t serve us and thrive. It’s a thread back to what is real.

When I am finished, if I have done my job well it will sing through you. You will not only remember your own wildness but feel it, pulsing inside of you, that happy expansion. You will look up at the stars and remember what you are made of. That you belong to the earth, and to each other. That you’ve always been wild. And nobody can take that away from you.

Thanks for being here. I am so lucky to walk this road with you.

I was working as a naturalist in a National Recreation Area just outside San Francisco—a park with sheer, rocky headlands that plunged into the Pacific. Until now, I’d only ever heard her. I’d be brushing my teeth or folding socks and the howling would send me rushing to the window. I loved coyotes for the same reason some people hated them: they were wild. I was a woman in her mid-twenties who was just starting to wake up to the ways she'd been tamed—how my culture had taught me to control my body; to distrust my own knowing; to make myself small and useful; to give my power away. A wild part of me had gone missing a long time ago. I wanted her back.

That place with its dry, rocky cliffs of once-living protozoa; with its hawk migrations and wildflower blooms and coyote song. That place was showing me how to touch her again.

The coyote paused on a low hill, ears pricked in my direction. Our eyes met, and I felt a current run through me, through her. I don’t know how else to describe it. Before either of us could move, the valley burst into song, yips and howls cascading down the dusty hills. I stood there wonder-crying, silently shaking, the boundary between me and the world so thin. The coyote raised her nose to the sky and let out one plaintive, chilling howl. Then, she turned toward her pack and vanished into the fading light.

If I’ve learned one thing from my 16 years as an outdoor guide, it’s that there’s a critical connection between wild spaces and our wild selves.

We live so much of our lives not turned up. Not fully on. There are songs inside of me. There are rivers and claws and teeth. There’s a whole parallel life in which I have a child, wanted and dreamed, with hair that smells like milk and afternoon sun. There’s a meadow in me in which things like dollars and cell phones and gender don’t make any sense. There are wolves in my body, a whole pack of them, pawing the ground, sniffing the air, looking for each other, running toward what’s calling them home.

In America, we settle for scraps of wildness. Sure, there are National Parks and Forests, there are treasured public lands, but as I write this their borders are shrinking; they are being parceled up to be sold for private profit. This would not be happening if we valued our own wildness and understood the harm done when a landscape and its people are tamed. Senate republicans just proposed placing 3.29 million acres of public lands on the auctioning block—a big ol’ fuck you to wildlife, our wild selves, habitat connectivity, clean water, and places where we go to touch trees, to ride bikes, to fish and hunt and stargaze, to remember where we came from.

What happens when we forget we are all connected? When we stop tending our uncommercial, uncultivated spirit? We’re finding out right now.

But it’s not too late to come back.

It’s been fifteen years since I met that coyote, but I can still draw a line from myself back to her. Spending time in that park changed how I listened to my own instincts, how I prioritized my life. We call our modern world the “real world,” the one with screens and cars and schedules, where trips outdoors are “escapes” and “vacations,” but I have never since forgotten the real real world, the one we are all a part of, pulsing and alive, growing through the sidewalk cracks.

That same current that runs through me and the coyote runs through you, too. I’ve felt it hiking a granite ridge in the White Mountains; watching a silent snowfall in the Maine Woods; paddling the Boundary Waters; sleeping under redwoods; stargazing on an island as bioluminescence blinks around my feet. I feel it every time I step outside, even if it’s as simple as watching a bumble bee gather pollen in my housemate’s flowers, or walking through a local forest park.

I suppose my job now is to make Congress feel it. (Here’s an easy way to call your senators. Please join me.) Most days it seems like they’re too far gone, but maybe some of them aren’t. And in the words of : “we don’t get to give up on life on Earth.”

In the fight to protect America’s public lands, I hope I always remember what they are: not just a weekend getaway or a resource to be managed, but who we’re able to become when we’re there.

That wild, happy expansion. The world, calling us back to ourselves.

The only time I remember playing flute in the last 17 years was when I was living in the Marin Headlands outside of San Francisco. I was caught in a love tangle and I needed to get quiet enough to hear myself, so I packed a tupperware of old ziti and a bottle of water and a hammock and my flute into a backpack and hiked into the hills alone. When darkness fell, I played for the coyotes and the moon and the ocean. I played for my own ears, my own heart. It was so wild.

We are waking up. There is a wildness in me and in you that is coming back on line. The billionaires in their plastic space suits appear hollow. We are hungry for what’s real.

Tonight, the flute finds its way out of the closet and into my hands. Cold metal, hot breath. It’s wrenching me back through time, but time is a circle, and there is enough of it, just for right now. One moment I am in an online writing class and the next I am weeping in my apartment, surrounded by tax documents and water glasses and dirty piles of clothes on the floor.

I light a candle. I push off my plans. I feel what I’ve been trying both to feel and not feel this whole time, the silencing and deportations, the noise and violent lies, the endless reminders that something corrosive is coming for the neighbors and trees and waters I love. There are so many people who know more than me, who have takes on what it all means and what we need to do, and so the only thing I ever find myself saying these days comes out like a prayer, even though I don’t pray much anymore: I am with you. I am with you. I am with you.

I want this, tonight, for us. Something we don’t have to go out and find; something we already have in our closets, in our bodies, that will call us back. A way to sing our own names.

Here it is, raw and un-retouched and probably flat. The first wild notes.

Grab some popcorn — it’s here!

I am thrilled to share Follow the Water, Maine Mountain Media’s short documentary that follows our 100-mile source to sea journey down a vital Maine watershed.

On May 5th, 2024, in honor of National Drinking Water Week, outdoor photographer Andy Gagne and I embarked on a paddling expedition from Bethel, Maine, to Casco Bay, kayaking 100 miles with a small team of local adventurers and environmentalists. Our mission was to transport our audience into the watershed, demonstrating how the rivers, forests and wildlife are all so connected to the faucet, and to highlight the unique and creative ways people are working together to protect this water source for future generations.

This adventure takes place on the unceded ancestral lands of the Wabanaki people. It begins in the mountains, on Songo Pond in Bethel. Following the Crooked River, we wind our way to Sebago Lake. Continuing down the Presumpscot River, we complete our trip in Casco Bay, 100 miles from their start.

Along the way, as well as in the weeks surrounding our river trip, we spend a lot of time listening to the people who are connected to the watershed. We visit a spawning site for Atlantic salmon with a wildlife biologist, climb aboard a boat for a water monitoring trip with Portland Water District scientists, discuss Maine breweries’ reliance on the watershed over a beer with Allagash Brewing’s sustainability coordinator, hear from a First Nations poet and environmental activist about the cultural and spiritual importance of protected waterways, and meet with Sebago Clean Waters and participating land trusts as well as Friends of the Presumpscot River and Friends of Casco Bay about their work in river, ocean, and watershed protection.

The story that emerges paints a compelling picture of just how connected we all are — people, river, ocean, land — and how all of us are needed to speak up for clean water.

Last weekend, we premiered this film to a packed house. We’re excited to see where it goes next. If you want to read an up-close-and-personal account of our journey, check out the essay I wrote about our adventure.

Thank you for being here, thank you for watching, and thank you for caring about clean water.

It’s a cold, gray morning on Songo Pond in the Maine mountains. Drybags are sealed, food is stashed. We squeeze ourselves into drysuits, buckle on PFDs, and slide our kayaks into the water.

It’s the beginning of May, National Drinking Water Week, and we’re setting off to paddle 100 miles down through one of Maine’s most critical watersheds — two rivers traditionally fished and traveled by the Wabanaki people, who have been caring for this place for centuries. Outdoor photographer Andy Gagne and I have spent years photographing and writing about the land and waters we love, but this is a chance to get intimate with our home. To learn the journey of a water droplet by going on it.

It’s one thing to know what a watershed is. It’s another entirely to understand it in your body.

A whopping 200,000+ people–1 in 6 Mainers–get their clean drinking water from the Sebago Lake watershed. This is thanks to the forests around it, which act as a natural filtration system, making it one of the top 50 cleanest water drinking supplies in the U.S. But development in Maine is booming, and losing just 8% of this forest could have huge and costly consequences for clean water. It’s a rare environmental story where humans haven’t destroyed the natural system yet – but the threat is real. Our mission is to transport our audience into the watershed, demonstrating how the rivers, forests and wildlife are all so connected to the faucet, and to highlight the unique and creative ways people are working together to protect these waters for future generations.

Our first day on the Crooked River finds us chest-high in cold water, pushing our boats through a tangle of bushes, and playing a careful game of limbo with the trees that have blown down in recent storms. We slip silently through high rocky gorges, over glassy black water framed by hemlocks. It starts to rain, as if the water knows what we’re doing, as if it’s saying, ready, set, go.

I get my first taste of a Crooked River rapid – shallow, bony, and technical – and I come out bleeding, having bashed my knuckles with a too-deep sweep of my paddle. Though I’m the only one Charlotte had to push off a rock, I’m a tiny bit relieved to see the others scraping the bottom, too. Andy, Charlotte, and Alex have all been boating for over ten years, which makes me very lucky. This is my second time in a whitewater kayak – the first was last Tuesday, when Alex gave me a crash course on pulling in and out of eddies – and though I’m the kind of person who, given a good cause, will cheerfully leap into just about anything, I’ll be honest: I’m terrified.

I know how to read a river. I trained as a raft guide on the American in California and the Kennebec in Maine. I’ve guided whitewater canoe trips on the Raquette River in the Adirondacks, and sea kayak expeditions in Casco Bay. The highest class rapid on the Crooked is a III, which I know I can do. But I’m paddling a borrowed boat, and it’s loaded and awkward. I can’t roll, so if I flip, I’ll swim. Not to mention people don’t really paddle this route, and we’re about to find out why – dams and downed trees; minimal camping; protected Atlantic Salmon habitat; shallow rocky rapids.

I close my eyes and summon the voice of the very first river guide who trained me. Delton was so good at what he did because he could deeply listen. “You have to ask permission, Jenny,” he would bellow over the roaring whitewater. “You have to dance with the river.”

I grip my paddle. I take a breath. And I try to dance.

We’re doing this, I keep reminding myself, for a very good reason.

Before, after, and during our river trip, Andy and I spend a lot of time listening to the people and organizations who are invested in protecting this watershed. Sebago Clean Waters, who lead a collaborative of conservation organizations in conserving the surrounding forests. Friends of the Presumpscot, who are working to restore and protect water quality, river habitat & native fisheries in the once highly-polluted Presumpscot River. Friends of Casco Bay, who use science, advocacy, and community education to protect the coastal ecosystem.

We visit a spawning site for Atlantic salmon with a wildlife biologist, climb aboard a boat for a water monitoring trip with Portland Water District scientists, and tour a water treatment plant. We meet Dick Anderson, one of the first fishery biologists to research the Crooked River in the 1960s, and discuss the importance of clean water for breweries over a cold beer with Allagash’s sustainability coordinator. We hear from Wolastoqey poet, artist, and environmental activist Mihku Paul about the cultural and spiritual importance of protected waterways for First Nations people.

The story that’s starting to emerge shows just how connected we all are – people, river, ocean, land – and how all of us are needed, right now, to protect the water that gives us life.

Bless the scientists who go to work each day to test water samples over and over; who rejoice in boring data. Bless the people who spend their lives protecting trees, bringing the fish back, helping rivers flow again. They are the reason we are healthy.

A good drysuit has a way of making one feel invincible, but the river reminds me that I’m not. At the top of a rapid we watch, mouths open, as a bald eagle takes off right in front of us. I’m so excited by the bird that I look at the rapids below and announce to Charlotte, “This doesn’t look so bad.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. “I didn’t mean it,” I whisper to the water as I bump down too fast, overshooting the lines. Just when I’m starting to get the hang of it, the river flips me against a rock, a slow-motion dump truck. After I’ve wet-exited and safely waded ashore, Alex pulls a pack of fruit snacks out of his PFD that he’s been saving for just this occasion. “Swimmer snacks!” he says. “Congratulations.”

At Twin Bridges, a protected tract of forestland 32 miles downstream from where we started, friends from the land trusts climb into canoes and we all go floating down. They look around wide-eyed at all the things they work behind computers to protect, remembering why. It really feels like spring now, the air wild with hatching mayflies, wings catching the sun. That night, after everyone leaves, we camp under a sky full of stars. We’re starting to loosen, to lean in.

Time passes in stone dams, darting fish, whitewater riffles and winding stretches of smooth water. The wood is the biggest problem. Unusually bad storms have blown down hundreds of trees, and we spend the bulk of every day dragging our loaded boats over, under, and around them. This makes Sebago Lake when we reach it feel like a big inhale: gray above, gray below, water and sky melting together. Nothing but open space.

Our entrance to the Presumpscot is rough: a long, muddy portage around a massive dam in driving rain. These two rivers could not have had a different history. We’re now paddling toward some of the most densely-populated areas of Maine, on a river that has been so industrialized that at one point you couldn’t go near it. Thanks to Wabanaki Chief Polin, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the countless people who have advocated over the last 250 years, water quality and fish passage have largely been restored, but we hear stories of how the toxins dumped in these waters would peel the paint off houses.

It’s been a long day, and spirits are low. As the light starts to fade we’re met by a surprise: a stranger named Peter in a faded green sweater who has been watching our GPS tracker online and has come to help us with the long portage. He loads our kayaks into his Subaru one by one and shuttles us the half mile back to the river, where on the island where we’re spending the night, his family is waiting with a welcome banner, banana bread, and piping hot bowls of soup.

I don’t know what moves me more – the friends and partners who have been waving from the bridges, or the strangers like Peter who have come to help or clutch umbrellas on the riverbank and cheer. The group of kayakers, canoeists, and paddleboarders who are waiting for us at the river’s mouth to paddle the final few miles together, or the crowd ringing bells as our bows touch the beach on Mackworth Island. It’s enough to bring me to tears, the fact that someone out there cares enough to track our blue dot. To show up.

What happens when you’ve been spilling downhill with the water for six days? You learn in your body what a river is.

We’ve been in this river, on this river, dancing with this river, sleeping next to this river, drinking this river. My body carries her water, though that’s true every day when I drink from the faucet at home. I hope I never forget this.

If you run your finger down our route from Bethel to Casco Bay on a map, you’ll read six different names for waterways, but don’t let that fool you into thinking they’re all separate. It’s just one river.

“I would ask people to think about the waters not as a fluid, a thing that sort of moves. Not as just wetness. Not as salt or fresh or bog,” Mikhu Paul tells me. “Think of the waters as something alive that supports something larger, and something larger, until we have this incredible whole which we call our home.”

What if we remembered this – that the river was alive? Would we be able to see beyond what she is to us; all the ways we use her?

Could we let her just be a river?

Could we let her thrive?

Trailer & Film: Maine Mountain Media
Photos: Andy Gagne Photography
Essay: Jenny O’Connell

A version of this essay was published on the NRS blog, Duct Tape Diaries.

The past few weeks have really clarified what I’m doing here. Wild Story started out as a collection of essays from the place where a life outdoors meets creative writing. Sure, that’s still part of it. But at the heart of all this is a creative quest to stay wild, tender, awake, and connected in a world that would have us forget that’s who we are.

I used to hide notes for strangers in airplane bathroom ashtrays. I’d scribble them on receipts, on torn pages from my journal, on the smooth blank paper of my ticket. They’d say things that felt urgent at the time, things I’d seen spray painted on abandoned buildings, like: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Or they were one-sentence letters written straight from my desire: Hello dear friend, you are so much wilder than you have been told.

Nobody else I know looks in airplane bathroom ashtrays for notes. Well, maybe now you might. If I knew you would, I might start leaving them again. But for a while it was just me. It took me until recently to realize that maybe I was talking to myself. Leaving breadcrumbs. Tiny prayers.

There’s something eerily beautiful, though, about whispering into the dark.

It seems to me like one of the best things we can do right now is help each other get unstuck.

I have a lot of people in my life who are feeling powerless. For most, it’s a crisis of capacity. Being human in a broken system is already a big job, all this regulating of nervous systems and trying to make money and keeping up (with what, I don’t quite know) and doing the best we can.

This is how they want us to feel. Overwhelmed. Like their power is inevitable. But dear god, it’s not.

My sister and I have started doing this thing that we call “Empower Hour.” It’s a weekly standing date on our calendar where we show up for one hour and do what needs to be done.

Do I think an hour a week is enough? Oh no. But it opens the door, lets the light in. Builds my muscles for doing more.

Here’s how you do it:

Directions for an Empower Hour

1. Physically block out an hour on your calendar. Do it now. This post is maybe about a five minute read, seven if you savor it, so why not make it part of your first one? Only 53 minutes to go and you’ve done it!

2. Make an email folder for all the action requests that are coming in. Label it “Empower Hour” or something else that will make you excited to return to it. If you don’t get action requests by email, some great places to start are Indivisible and Americans of Conscience, both of which offer bite-sized weekly actions and provide easy scripts for calling senators. The ACLU, Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) the Appalachian Mountain Club Conservation Action Network (CAN) and National Resource Council of Maine are a few more I get. There are a million! Look nationally, and especially locally. Leave your favorites in the comments! Find a few that resonate with you, and start there. When the emails start coming in, put ‘em in the folder. It sounds so simple it’s dumb, but trust me. They’ll be there for you when you’re ready for them, instead of yelling at you urgently from between that bill from the dog groomer and that email from your mom.

3. When Empower Hour comes, open the folder. Do the actions. Delete the ones you’ve done. It feels great.

4. Find a buddy. (This one’s important.) It can be me! DM me for an accountability spreadsheet I started for myself, complete with snarky commentary and mess-ups. Rev me up by adding your own. I’d love to do this with you.

That’s it.

Design for what works. Sometimes my hour bleeds into two. Sometimes I bring snacks and something bubbly and make it a party. I am a very carrot oriented human.

Here’s the thing about starting with an hour: you’re starting. As of this moment, 229 people subscribe to my Substack. (If you enjoy Wild Story, please share with other wildhearted people & help us all find each other!)

That’s 229 hours (plus mine, so 230). 230 different voices ringing senators and standing up for our rights adds up fast. Let’s make it 500. Let’s make it all of us.

Wild, tender, awake, and connected.

So, back to the beginning. Back to the quest. They change all the time, but here’s what these words mean to me right now:

Wild: Ungovernable, fiercely joyful, loyal only to the communities and creatures and places I love and the pulls of my own damn heart.

Tender: letting it all in, staying soft and human and alive.

Awake: Clear-eyed about the urgency of this moment, that the worst of history could (and will) repeat itself if we do nothing. Simultaneously awake to wonder, awe, beauty, and everything worth protecting.

Connected: to myself, to you, and to the world. Always, always, always. Isn’t that the point?

It’s the only way, y’all.

Now, for the love of all that is holy, go outside and touch a tree. Nobody gets to take your joy, so don’t you dare give it away for free.

Sorrow Is Not My Name
by Ross Gay

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.

It was also one of the best things to ever happen to me.

The book has been many things, but I think we’re rounding the corner into the truest thing she has come to say so far. She’s turning out to be about the wild parts of ourselves we give up, and how we realize what we’ve done and go get them back. About how we live in a system that makes us forget we are alive and connected, and how important it is—for ourselves, for each other, and for the world—that we remember.

Wild is a choice, I scribbled to myself on a piece of paper this week. The verdict’s still out on whether or not I believe that’s true, but if you’ve been reading these for a while, you know I love scribbling on pieces of paper. It’s my way of flying by the stars; how I lead myself to where I need to go. You also know that there are giant rolls of scribbled-on paper piled in the corner of my room, and sticky notes all over my computer. I’d be embarrassed to have you over. Right now, the sticky notes are red and yellow and orange and they say things like:

Hunt what you fear.

What calls you home?

And: Is it alive?

That’s my newest thing, to ask the book I’m writing if she’s alive. I ask it to each sentence, each paragraph, each section. I’m drafting new stuff again, which the inner perfectionist in me hates. She’d much rather edit. But she can go to hell for now. Is it alive? is a much better question than is it good?

That’s another thing I learned in Finland. I would trade good for alive any day.

I started writing this, as I start most Wild Stories, with the intention of writing about something else entirely. Hooray for me! That means I’m still listening, still giving up control, which is a good thing.

But I do want to tell you about my writing desk. I’ve been sitting on this story for almost a year now, since my friend made it for me with her own two hands out of an old maple on her property. My sister, who has been with me for this whole twisty book-writing ride, went in on it with me for Christmas last year. It’s my forever writing desk: smooth, and blonde, and heavy as all hell. It’s got one beam across the bottom that I bang my shins on most days, and two drawers that open quickly and close slowly because of those fancy drawer stoppers they make now. Waterfall edges and joinery that looks like it belongs in a tiny timber frame. It’s a fucking work of art, this desk. And I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that when I sit down to write here, it hums.

We’re partners now, in this work. My book is also about land, and extraction. It takes place in the gold fields of Lapland’s Lemmenjoki National Park, where I lived in the wilderness (in the backcountry sense, not the “pristine, untouched nature” sense) with a community of reclusive Finnish gold prospectors for three months. It’s about the cost of a wild life, and how we can never, when it comes to the earth, give more than we take. But we can honor what we keep.

From the book:

“These are people who live close to God, their god, the river. They bathe in her, scoop her up in containers to make coffee, drink her down. They skin ptarmigan and watch her current run red, then clear. They rake her bottom with their shovels, feed her through a sluice, collect her finest, densest soil in their pans, bottle up and pocket her gold. Each strike of the shovel sounds like ehkä. Maybe. At night they warm their hands around a potbelly stove and tell her stories. When the last birch leaves touch the ground they drive south; spend five frozen months dreaming of the sound of running water.

When the ground thaws, they’ll return to the river. They’ll tear up her banks, trap her in pools, block her path with great mounds of her own rocky soil. It might seem as though they do not love her, these men and women who gouge and pocket her riches, but look at the way they close their eyes to feel the breeze off her current. Pay attention to the tenderness of their hands as they cup her soil. Watch them watch their children play in her shallows. Sit with them as the midnight sun pretends to dip into Norway and rises again and they cry and talk about freedom.”

Christina Hassett, the craftswoman and old soul who built me this desk, wrote me a letter that she gave to me when she delivered it. I keep it in one of the drawers. It makes me weep every time I read it. I want to share a piece of it with you tonight:

Jenny,

It has given me so much to craft this desk for you. When we cleared the land for our house site, I felt a profound sadness. How predictably human of us to come in and begin our relationship with this place by first knocking down its resident giants—especially this particular tree. It was a magical old maple, somewhat gnarled and twisted with vast spreading branches. And down she came. I often reflect on this and wonder how we could’ve begun here in a more gentle way, but here we are.

Up until this winter, much of the wood we had milled up had just been sitting, drying, collecting dust. Until you approached me with the delicious idea of building a desk! The maple immediately came to mind. Over the past several weeks, working with (and sometimes it felt against…) this wood had me often reflecting on the tree that was. Studying the grain and color and pattern, deciding how I may be able to transform those boards, or rather transcend them, into desk form. And as I worked I thought of all the creatures that knew the tree. The birds, whose probable first view of the world was a sky dappled with maple leaves. The worms who moved, slept, ate and lived out their entire lives in its cambium. The squirlls squirell squirells, whose canopy highways criscrossed its branches. How many times she changed dresses from vibrant green to flaming red over the years.

It was all just so overwhelming as I thought about it and realized my own hands now entering the timeline. I am now, too, a creature whose life path has intersected with this tree—and it is my desperate hope that what I’ve made from the still strong bones (even in death) of this tree pays homage and tribute to that long and storied life.

The letter goes on to say how she sees, in my hands, the legacy of the tree continuing. How everyone who reads my words—which are literally held up by this desk—will become part of the life of this tree. That means you.

(Also, it took me until I read that letter to realize how ridiculous the word “squirrel” is.)

I didn’t plan out how to end this. I guess I just wanted to remind you and me both, in this season of gift-giving and overconsumption, that the song that sings through every single thing sings in us, too.

And when we remember to listen for it, it gets louder.

Yesterday, the day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, I took my sad heart for a drive up to Georgetown to be in community with my students. When I arrived, they were turning trash into art. (What a fucking metaphor, right?) Wire, fabric, discarded Altoids tins, egg cartons, magnetic poetry, plastic forks—you name it. The prompt was simple: to make something that expresses how you’re feeling right now.

What struck me as I watched them string up their art was how their disappointment and rage and fear hung right next to their gentleness. How human it all was. I am having a hard time staying soft. I’ve been on edge, wondering if I really know my neighbors at all. I’ve been thinking in us vs. them, misplacing blame, forgetting that other people are hurting too and this is why we’re here. I needed to watch my students carefully putting the pieces together with their hands. I needed to witness their mercy. I wrote down their hot-glued phrases of magnetic poetry.

Then, on the drive home, I started to sing.

It was a day that I did not feel like singing, but the song came anyway, soaring out of me as I passed trucks and rivers on the dark highway, insisting I feel the whole moment. It brought me to tears—the good kind that remind you that you are alive. I was singing their words.

Later that night, I took the song to my talented bandmates, Will Hewes and Zack Anchors. We recorded it on Will’s phone, imperfect and unpracticed, each of us just inhabiting the now, together.

There will be days to come when we need to fight like hell for what we love. Right now, I just need to remember my own humanity.

Lyrics:

My hand is open

Could we forgive through every bend in time? 

Stand up

See the space between 

Balance

Ignite

Go forward

hold light. 

The man said, “What?”

“It’s—” Cue David, playing the best Godzilla I’ve ever heard. Which is easy, because back then I’d never seen Godzilla, and I still haven’t.

“It’s—” I started to make noises, too. Mangled choking sounds, godawful sounds.

“SAVE YOURSELF! SAVE YOURSELF!” I yelled. And I hung up.

The only point I’m making is how much I hate strangers calling me. Which is why you might be surprised to learn that I have become one of them.

Annoyingly, phonebanks appear to be one of the most effective tools we have for encouraging voters to turn out for the 2024 U.S. election — what could be the most consequential election of my lifetime. There are many to choose from, but I went with the Environmental Voter Project. Over 8 million environmentalists did not vote in the 2020 presidential election and over 13 million skipped the 2022 midterms. EVP is a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on changing that.

The other night, I joined my first phonebank. I felt a little guilty doing it, knowing there might be someone out there who hates getting calls from strangers as much as I do. But on the other hand, if there’s someone else out there who’s just a little too overwhelmed with life (because who isn’t?) to make a voting plan, someone who needs a little nudge, a little love, someone from Pennsylvania or North Carolina, well then.

In an hour and a half, I talked to one nice person on the phone who said he was going to vote. I talked to a lot of people who said I had the wrong number. I left four voicemails. I got hung up on a lot. I felt a little bit like I was doing something. I felt a lot a bit like I was doing absolutely nothing. Wrong numbers are great! The kind and patient person running the chat said. They tell us where to stop focusing our efforts. The experience was uncomfortable. Unglamorous. Not in my wheelhouse, not even a little.

But the thing that made it worth it, the thing that still makes me cry when I think about it, were the people in the Zoom room who didn’t think to turn off their video cameras. Grumpy and tired at the end of a long day, I watched them with my own screen black. All those earnest faces. All those raised eyebrows, those soft lines. The way their heads tilted when they heard someone’s voice on the other end. Their trembling chins, their craned necks. All those people on a Wednesday night just trying to make a difference. Asking, Will you be there, too?

I thought of birds, singing at dawn. I thought of whales, the time I dipped my head beneath the Pacific and heard a humpback groaning and wavering and soaring, clear and bone-deep. I thought of the ways things get communicated across the landscapes that divide us.

Since I started writing for the Appalachian Mountain Club this September, it’s become abundantly clear to me how much each of us is needed. I was already interested in conservation and climate change, already telling stories about sustainability, and inclusivity in the outdoors, and the intersection of people’s passions with this moment in the earth’s history. Heck, I teach a class about connecting people heart-first to climate action through creative writing. I’m actually writing this to you from a treehouse classroom in midcoast Maine, surrounded by my students, who are also tap-tapping away on their computers in search of the right words.

But there was so much I didn’t know. There’s so much I still don’t know. The difference is that now it’s literally my job—not just to know, but to translate these things into something that can be felt. Did you know about 30x30, the 2021 goal established by the United States and world leaders to protect at least 30% of lands and waters by the year 2030? How about the WWF Living Planet report that found wildlife populations have declined by 73% since 1970? I’m still catching up. I’m late to the party. Or maybe I’d arrived to the party, but I was stuck in the foyer where it was cold and the music was kind of bad. I’m here to tell you that the real party is in the kitchen, and it’s hot and joyful, and there’s plenty of room. It’s ok if you’re late as long as you’re here.

Speaking of joy, I’ve been reading Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s book (& Substack) What if We Get It Right, in which she asks my new favorite question: What if we act as if we love the future? If you feel stuck or unsure of where to put your feet in all this, I recommend checking out her climate venn diagram:

• What brings you joy?

• What are you good at?

• What needs doing?

Join me. In voting climate up and down the ballot. In calling. (I’ll be there tonight, and likely Sunday too, but if that doesn’t work for you, here are more.) In donating. In believing a better world is possible. In loving this fucking earth through small and meaningful action. In hoping. And I mean hope in the way Rebecca Solnit means it:

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the Earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... ​To hope is to give yourself to the future—­ and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

What I didn’t expect—what I never expect even though I’ve done this enough times by now to know that I should—was how much magic would meet me back. Calm seas. A friend who lent us seven kayaks to pull this off. The faces of people I love (and some I’m just getting to know), radiant with surprised joy and orange light. We paddled home with headlamps on, beneath a dusky sky that pulled shadows through the water, making every ripple a whole moment. I fell asleep brimming, my kitchen a mess of leftovers and wine and a crumpled banana, grateful, thinking it was done.

But that’s not how magic works.

Last night it struck again when I drove up at the end of a long day to work a campfire circle at Seguinland Institute, the gap semester program where I teach creative writing and outdoor adventure, and my students came with an Irish fiddle, an electric bass, shy voices, and the vulnerability it takes to offer a song. Again when the Seguinland director materialized out of the woods with a plate of pancakes because I’d said once in passing that sometimes I liked eating breakfast for dinner. Again during a walk with a can of cider and a friend under the almost-full moon. Again. Again. Again.

My body woke me up this morning at 4:30am: the time of my birth 38 years ago. I walked barefoot out to the water, where I stood under Orion and listened to the flapping of fish in the outgoing tide. I came back to bed and wrote into dawn.

“There are two paths to magic: imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods. Paying attention is about intentional noticing,” writes poet and naturalist Jarod K. Anderson. “Magic requires our attention, our choice to participate. We must choose to meet it halfway. And when we do, we often find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning. A nod to the unquantifiable.”

Funny, isn’t it, how the unquantifiable is perhaps the best way to measure a life. Please god let me never forget this.

I started keeping a list of Things That Are Magic two years ago, and I’ve been adding to it ever since. Here it is so far: Moonlight on water. The saucy shimmer of an August evening. Summer tomatoes. Rain. Flickering candlelight. The silent seconds after a song ends. The Internet (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but one never knows why, or how). Goat cheese. Fireflies. Fragrance of lilac. A lover’s fingers pressed gently into the nape of my neck. A slow kiss. 

Lawn sprinklers. Hummingbirds. Wooden things made by hand. Tall jeans. The point in a good book when a hook appears behind my bellybutton and yanks me all the way through the end. The point on a run when I forget that I’m running. Whale song. Dancing. The time I forgot my cleats at the most important frisbee tournament of the year and found a pair in the lost in found, exactly my size.

Being in the right place and knowing it. The unspooling of a body in a sauna. A baby’s tiny fingers. The smell of snow. An airplane landing strip at night. Prisms. Treehouses. The way a dog knows when it’s time to go outside and lay down to meet her death. 

Yellow leaves spinning against blue sky. The perfect bite: salt, fat, crunch, squish, honey; the way my body trembles to taste it. Pocket rocks. Cold plunges. Love notes left for strangers in cracked brick walls. The sound of pen on paper. Bioluminescence.

When you’re driving away giddy from the hospital and you want to squeal your tires but you don’t just in case they hear and change their minds. Dad, at 82, singing in a truck with the windows down. The moments before dawn when everyone in the house is breathing in the dark. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Old growth trees. The way they make me cry. This place. Did you know that owl feathers are studded with fringe that muffles the sound of their flight? That an Eastern hemlock can live for over 500 years? That river otters hold hands while they sleep? That some mosses glow in the dark? A white pine cluster has five needles, which is the same number as the letters w-h-i-t-e. A red pine has three: r-e-d.

There are so many corners in my heart for this. 

Every year on my birthday, I write myself a letter, which I hide in a drawer until it’s my birthday again. The older I get, the less advice I end up giving myself. Maybe I’ve gotten better at trusting the magic that makes up a life. Maybe I’ve gotten better at telling myself the truth. This year’s letter ends like this:

Don’t think too hard about it, love. Just go on. Be it.

Over the last four years, we’ve gone backpacking, climbed rock walls, and canoed the Rangeley Lakes. This time, our adventure was sailing the ocean in a 30-foot pulling boat. Everything—and I mean everything—happened aboard. We got really good at changing under a sarong, sleeping absolutely still, yelling “eyes away!” when we had to use the bathroom. But the ocean was always a hand’s length away, and that was reward enough. We swam with seals, sailed with porpoises. Plunged, sleepy and shivering, into the cold Atlantic every morning before seven. Each night I slipped my fingers through the dark water and watched bioluminescent plankton blink on like so many stars.

This was an emotional course for me. I am so thrilled to tell you that I have accepted a full time job writing for the Appalachian Mountain Club. I never thought that I—a freelancer with literally twelve jobs—would type those words together, “I” and “accepted” and “full time job,” but here we are. When something is exactly right, it finds a way. It’s the work I’m already doing but with a salary. It’s the direction I’m headed (more on that in a minute). It’s my dream job. It also means giving up, at least for now, something I really love.

I wrote this short letter while on course for my successor, whoever they may be. May the magic continue.

A letter to the next Telling Room instructor at Outward Bound:

You’ve said yes to adventure. Packed your clean laundry, your new boots, maybe a secret chocolate bar (definitely bring the chocolate bar) and driven to the end of the road. You’ve settled into camp: nestled your tarp into a grove of hemlocks and birches near a lake, or maybe you are learning how to sleep in a straight line on a pulling boat for the first time. You’ve squatted a mosquito, or six. You’re trying to remember to floss your teeth, where you put your headlamp; trying to stay one step ahead of the students. Home–your soft bed, your calendar, the cell phones and cars and people–is fading to a dull roar in the distance. Your brain and your heart suddenly have space.

Time moves differently here. Every minute a slow drip, melting into days of sun and salty air, loon calls and laughter, surprise thunderstorms and pooping in the wilderness. Your hands are tan, and they are learning to tie new knots. Your hair is tangled and you don’t care. You yell back at the belligerent red squirrels who hurl pinecones at your head; call hello to the harbor seals. Your plans for the future have narrowed to what shirt you will wear to bed, and what’s in the snack mix. You hope that today will be the day you get a brazil nut. 

You are, what they call here, an “adult.” The students curse or crack a dirty joke and then sneak apologetic glances at you, as if they’ve forgotten that you, too, were young once not so long ago, and that one doesn’t grow out of these things, you just learn to read the room better. They look at you as if you know things, and you do: how to thrive outside, how to help birth a story, how to be patient. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re supposed to have all the answers. It’s better if you show up open, ready to be surprised.

And surprised you will be: A morning plunge into an ocean so cold it takes your breath away. Unexpected raucous laughter. The storm rolling in too fast, changing all the well-laid plans. And your students, weird and bright and brave, who show their care by holding a sarong, by carrying the heavier bucket, by heckling each other over spice kit mishaps at dinner. The sentences they write inspire you, so deliciously new and creative you wish you’d written them.

And that’s just it, isn’t it? The secret? You are a student out here, too, learning how to believe in loon song and ocean salt, hazy sunsets and wildhearted humans. Letting the sharp fin of a porpoise fill you with wonder. Pushing into discomfort until you find your own power, until your fingers brush god. And even after you drive away from this place–months later, years later, forever later–some part of you will always be here, sitting cross-legged in the dark, sharing stories with friends under the slowly spinning stars. 

I have been looking for a more significant way to use my talents and passions in service to the natural world. Starting this September, I will be hiking out to AMC lodges, tagging along on adventures, following trail crews and scientists around, and telling the story of an organization I really believe in, one that combines science, advocacy, protection, and stewardship to do the big environmental work we collectively need to do.

I want to share this video with you that landed in my inbox tonight. It gave me shivers. The clips are from Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest, an event in Maine last year that was co-organized by Protect Ancient Forests and my friend and writing mentor, Rick Bass. It was the most beautiful expression of poetry, music, writing, song, and collective action I’ve ever seen.

Everyone, giving from their highest selves what they can. Art in action. This is where I’m headed. I hope you’ll come, too.

For me, every interview is a practice in deep listening. I’m cracking jokes and putting people at ease and writing down what they say, sure. But what I’m really doing is listening for the truth. Not the words they’re speaking, necessarily, but the universal thing that hovers under the surface of every conversation. The place where the script runs out. Getting there often takes time.

After my first two questions, I ditched my list of questions and listened to the air between us instead. What I remember most was how easily we both laughed. How the things Ada said were, remarkably, things I’d been thinking about, too. We talked about the kind of self-permission it takes for a writer to be wholly herself on the page. We talked about surrender. We talked about long walks, and leaving space for what the world wants to say.

“There are so many of us that are tender to the world and receptive to wonder,” she said. “We’re porous. Beauty hurts. Attachment hurts. And it’s not a bad thing. It’s a way that we are moved and pierced by the world.”

I think about that still. Porous.

In order to write, I have to go through periods of living in my body. That’s where I’ve been. Out, dissolving myself into spring and summer, leaving space for what the world wants to say. Right now, I’m writing this to you over a hotspot from a little rustic cabin on Norton Island, and the world sounds an awful lot like the hungry mosquito who just got in. At five a.m. it sounded like a chugging lobster boat. Yesterday, it sounded like loon song.

I was telling Rosy, one of the visionary supporters of the arts who, along with her late husband, Steve Dunn, founded the Norton Island Residency for Writers & Artists, about the other day when I was lying in bed with a book and listening to the raindrops on the cabin skylight and my body was so full of rest and quiet and reading and rain and it felt like so much love that tears came to my eyes and I whispered, thank you.

“You’re so tender,” Rosy said.

I opened my mouth to argue but then closed it because she’s right. I have never considered myself someone who is easily undone. But you know what, maybe I am. And maybe tender is the point. Maybe it’s the work.

Tender, this spring, looked like paddling 100 miles in whitewater kayaks with my photographer friend, Andy Gagne, and a small team of environmentalists on a source to sea expedition from Bethel, Maine via the Crooked River to Casco Bay. We traced the journey of the water with our bodies, and are preparing to tell the story for the sake of clean drinking water and river protections. I wonder-cried at the eclipse. Prayed to the red-tailed hawks that kept flying in front of my windshield. Got tipsy on green maple buds, dandelions, early waterfalls. Sang harmony, wrote slowly.

This summer, tender was filling my family’s kitchen with cooking and warmth while my mom recovered from hip surgery. I said yes to guiding a last-minute trip to Iceland, rejoiced that I could be freezing in June, marveled at waterfalls and rainbows and a landscape that looked like Mars, noticed the extra pudge starting to gather around the bottom of my belly and thanked the Arctic char, the Icelandic lamb, the lemon and yogurt and fresh rye bread, the hands that made it so. I offered support freely. Sang in a bar. Kissed somebody new. A couple somebodies. Praised my body for carrying me over mountains, down backroads, back and forth across frisbee fields in the hot sun. When time moved too fast I sat in an Adirondack chair in the backyard and let it run through me until I could stand up and keep going again.

Staying tender can also be painful. It means trembling at the news because of the genocide in Gaza, the killing and killing, the lost humanity, the enormous collective grief, and I know that if I look directly it will swallow me for some time, but it’s the least I can do, look. Witness. It means waking up in Iceland to the news that my country’s highest court is trying to crown a king, has made it legal to arrest people for sleeping on the street, has left women’s bodies dangling in the balance, and slipping out silently to weep by a waterfall before I meet my clients so that I can meet them at all. It means looking at the blue Atlantic and feeling the loss of a friend from Albany who loved that ocean, who believed in me so strongly that sometimes when I faltered in my writing, when I wished for a life that was safer and saner, Dennis’ faith in me was the only thing that kept me true. It means that when my sister and I watched a deer, struck by a car going 75, fly through the air and fall twisted to the pavement, after checking on the driver I got back in the car and cried for the deer because he was dying alone and nobody was thinking of him, because somebody needed to.

I believe that the urge to protect, to armor ourselves, is what will destroy us. If the American people elect Donald Trump to the presidency this November, it will be a failure of tenderness. A failure to feel what’s at stake with more than our minds. A failure to let grief and joy into our bodies in great enough measure to know the truth. I believe the only way into—and through—this moment is, as terrible as it sounds, to let it in. I also believe that we are made for this.

Sometimes, art is just living in your body. It’s being here. And trusting that when you come back, you’ll have something that wants you to say it.

“Stay Gentle”
by Brandi Carlile
From the seagulls, the lobster boats, the flies, the forest, and me.

Give Me This

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

7. Accountability. We all need a creative community who will hold our dreams tenderly. How are you living your own wild story? Drop a comment below and tell us! Share what you’re working on, big themes and burning questions, hopes, challenges, links to your work. Name something you’ve been wanting to name. Any medium, any passion. We want to hear about it.

   

It’s been four months of Wild Story! Four months of finger-painting on the line between creative writing and the outdoors, of showing up with no map and creating something off-the-cuff and real for you, every time. It’s been a thrill and a joy.

Last month, I made the decision to turn off paid subscriptions for the time being, while I watch to see how/if Substack will get its act together around moderating hateful rhetoric. I believe in this, and it also means taking a financial hit.

I am asking this of you: help me take that value and give it back to Wild Story in a different way. One of my hopes on the edge of submitting my adventure memoir to publishers is to prove to literary gatekeepers that there are a whole lot of wildhearted people out there who believe in the importance of nurturing wild places inside and out, in the radical act of deepening into a creative life, in living life like you’re alive. If you’ve felt moved by what you’ve read, it would be the biggest gift to me if you’d link to Wild Story on social media, send it to your friends, share it. My plan (though it feels like a misguided one, at times, in this weird world) is to keep shooting from the heart and trust my words will find their way to the right people. Help me find the wildhearted ones.

Here are a few highlights from Wild Story’s first four months in the world:

The Crowd Favorite: Alpine Start
The Strangest Life Advice: Keeping Time
The Scariest One to Write: Voice Lessons

Thank you for walking with me.