There are trails we take to nowhere in particular.

There are trails we take to discover. There are trails we take to recover. There are trails we take to find ourselves. And there are trails taken out of habit, nostalgia, or out of ambition, or because of heartbreak.

Sometimes we have a destination and sometimes we wander. The mechanics are the same. One foot and then the other.

We are engineered for movement. Stagnation can be spiritual, emotional, intellectual, or developmental, but no matter. A long walk will help in every case.

And if we cannot walk, then we move what we can and the fog will lift, God willing.

Sometimes we take to the trail with a friend and other times we would rather be alone. In either case we have the opportunity to listen. I don’t know if this is true for everybody, but the things I hear on the trail stay with me for a long time. Maybe not the words so much, but everything behind the words.

I remember two brothers tearfully confessing their admiration for one another. They have since lost their father and their mother is not long for the world, may God have mercy on their souls. These brothers will grieve, but I am not worried for them. They have each other. I am confident of this because of what I heard them say to each other on the trail.

I remember a married couple celebrating an anniversary on the trail. A poem was recited. More tears.

I remember throwing rocks with other men as we hiked under an overcast desert sky. I can’t remember what we were looking for out there, but we discovered how much we liked to play and we talked about how important that is. We’ve been playing ever since.

I remember singing songs with friends on the trail and listening to my wife recite prayers as we scrambled through rocky darkness. I remember hearing the labored breathing of companions as we climbed and even the dry heaves of the particularly unprepared.

I remember camping with a man who woke up to say that his back hurt after sleeping on the ground and that he wanted to go home. I remember another man who forgot his allergy medicine and was miserable with sneezing and congestion, but he did not want to go home. I remember still another man who was fearful he might die after his body locked up and he felt he could not move. We gave him candy to address his hypoglycemia and he thought it was magic.

I remember a man deeply saddened by his inability to keep up with his companions on the trail. He was mad at himself, disappointed in his decisions to not take better care of himself. More frustrating was the possibility that he might be holding others back. I watched his sadness turn to awe and exhilaration as others decided to slow down and keep pace with him. At camp, he would get up early to heat water for his friends in a balancing act of gratitude. This remains one my favorite memories from the trail.

I remember hiking with a Muslim woman who was deeply in love with a Christian man. She knew it was religiously wrong to take things further, but she had never been treated with the gentle acceptance that he offered. She did not feel that she deserved him and there was no room in her imagination for anything better. I find myself angry with her father, though I never knew him. I don’t suppose she did either, at least no part of him that mattered.

I remember talking with an amateur linguist on the trail who shared that the letter “L” is theorized to be a pictogram of the human tongue and this is why language, lollipop, and lick all begin with it. These are words that describe some action of or relationship to the tongue and this example holds true across multiple language families.

It’s not just conversations that stick with me.

The sound of thunder echoing through the granite walls of King’s Canyon is not a sound I will ever forget. The reverberant thump and splash of rocks tumbling along the lower banks of the Smith River had me and my brother imagining enormous steelhead launching their way upstream. The rustle of birds in the leaf litter always sounds more sinister than it should, especially when hiking alone. The yipping of coyotes in the dark distance is something of a desert lullaby. But they need to be far, far away.

These days, I mostly walk with our goats and our dog. The goats like to browse and munch as they go and there isn’t a lot of forward progress. That’s mostly frustrating for our dog who tugs at his leash wanting to sniff and paw and pee on all of the new and interesting things on the trail. But as he gets older he’s more open to sitting with me until the goats have had their fill and they’re ready to move on.

We are a shambling, crunching, gamboling lot. And there’s more conversation than you might imagine.

Goats like to sound off as they eat, kind of like a game of Marco Polo, a little call-and-response to make sure that the herd hasn’t run off without them. I’m a part of that and if I’ve decided to take the dog around a corner where the goats can’t see me, I’ll call out. They’ll call back and we’ll just keep doing that until they find me.

Our dog, AD, is a particularly good listener. It’s his superpower. I can pretty much tell him anything and I get those big, brown, empathic eyes responding with everything I need to know.

There are trails, forked and meandering, that are meant to be explored and others that are groomed to get you to exactly one place. There are trails that have been lost over time. They lead to places that nobody wants to go. That wasn’t always the case, but things change.

Intimacy with a trail is possible and encouraged. We need not be excessively preoccupied with the fresh and the novel. We can take the same trail at different times. Perhaps in the morning or in the evening or after a rain or once the sun has set. Walk the trail through all of the seasons.

Here in the Sierra foothills, we have two trails just outside the Camp One homestead. One follows a creek before opening up on a beautiful little meadow. The other climbs to a lovely pond overgrown with duckweed. Though we walk them frequently, it is truly wondrous how different the experience can be depending on pace, company, time of day, or the day of the week.

Our experience as creation is dynamic and contextual. This is why movement becomes us. We are ever-changing, in constant flux, moving perhaps from ignorance to knowledge to forgetfulness, heedlessness, repentance, forgiveness, humility, and then to gratitude.

That is one path.

Another might take us to bitter selfishness. A lot of it depends on the time of day and the company we keep.

Regardless, if we are alive at the end of whatever trip we happen to be on, we should be quick to take another. A day may come when we no longer believe the trail holds any promise. We may fall into the trap of believing that we have seen it all, or worse, that whatever remains is not worth seeking out.

In these moments, we are helped by a recollection of the very nature of the trail. Erosion, weather, light, the falling of trees and the splitting of rocks, nothing is ever the same on the trail.

And nothing is ever the same with you. Or me.

We cannot give up on the trail.

Because truth be told, brothers and sisters, we are the trail.

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