A month away: the yoga of the intermission

I’m a month away from setting foot on the Pacific Crest Trail, and that has its own kind of wildness: liminal, electric, uncomfortable, sacred.

I keep trying to imagine that first step, I know it is yet to come. I know it will be real. I just can’t touch it yet. What I can feel is this strange, thin middle ground.

My wild hiker friends light up when I talk about the trail. I can see the emotion in their eyes, they are living through me somehow. I feel like I already carry all of our collective anticipation in my backpack.

And then there are my non-trail friends. Those who tilt their heads and ask: “But… why?”
The ones who look at me like I’ve calmly announced that I’m walking to Canada for fun… For them this is unimaginable, unnecessary. Maybe a little crazy. Somewhere in the middle of all that, there is me.

The only thing I want to talk about is the trail. Every conversation somehow revolves around miles, gear, snowpack, resupply boxes. I’m already there in my mind. And at the same time, all I want is No conversation track…. to protect it. Keep it close, sacred and unexamined. Because every time I try to explain it, it gets smaller. It becomes a logistical thing instead of a spiritual thing and an adventure.

it is at the same time everything and Too fragile for words.

And maybe that’s where yoga has been my silent companion in all of this. Lihat juga qaz2. A decade of learning to stay:
in discomfort,
in uncertainty,
In a breath that feels too tight,
in moments that I feel could open me up.

Yoga has taught me to maintain the in-between. How to listen to the parts of me that whisper under the noise. How to sit in advance without trying to figure it out, reduce it, or turn it into something more digestible.

On my mat, I learned the discipline of returning to presence, again and again, of meeting myself honestly, even when the ground beneath me felt unstable. That same practice is what allows me to be here now, in this long and thin month before everything, without trying to rush.

The trail will require endurance, strength and determination.
And this moment – ​​the one just before the beginning – asks for something softer: the ability to remain with what is: presence. Yoga has taught me that. It’s the thread that’s helping me maintain the wild, electric sacredness of this interlude without breaking it too soon.

All I can do now is keep showing up: training, on my mat, breathing, until it’s time to take my first step on the Pacific Crest Trail… A month away.

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