Into the Wild
Image provided by @neom.
As you may know, this year my website is celebrating its 15th anniversary. I am doing a lot of things to mark the special occasion including sharing the 15 most read stories from the last 15 years. Today’s essay was published back in 2015. Much to my amazement, it continues to find an audience and resonate with people. I hope it does the same for you. Please, enjoy, “To Measure Yourself, Just Once.”
Be good to each other,
Nathan
"He could be alone without being lonely" -Carrie McCandless
Be good to each other,
-Nathan
"I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best... I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is." -Everett Ruess
"I don't apologize for being hard to know... I am what I am..." -Rod McKuen
Be good to each other,
-Nathan
“As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty...." -Everett Ruess
Be good to each other,
-Nathan
"The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each to have a new and different sun." -Christopher McCandless
"You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living." -Christopher McCandless
Be good to each other,
-Nathan
"To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality." -Paul Shepard
Be good to each other,
-Nathan
