“I wander because I’m in love with nowhere and no one. I wander to keep it that way.”

Here’s an exciting thing!

She Explores publishes writing by women about their experiences in the out-of-doors. I’ve been working on this essay for months, and today it was published! Wahoo! Visit She Explores to read.

This essay is called Wanderlove. One of the things you might not know about me as a writer is that I often figure out how I feel about something by writing about it. Nomadic identity necessarily includes both periods of deep loneliness and times of wonder and exhilaration. Writing this essay was how I discovered that my nomadic identity had shifted much more toward the loneliness end of the spectrum then I had realized.

No surprises here: this essay examines my relationship with Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, among other places. This is a love story, examining the struggle to love, and the fear of commitment, of loss. Relationship between people mirrors relationship with landscape.

“There are some holes that can never be filled, wounds that will never fully heal, love that can never be replaced… The love I lost at Moosilauke was rooted in a naivete that I no longer possess. The way I loved Beau was likewise a dangerous kind of love, that would have made me stay in Oregon when I knew I could never love the landscape. When he broke my heart, he left me to wander through people as I wander through places, afraid of the preemptive commitment I might make to the wrong thing. And now, even more afraid to find the right thing.”

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the very real people who become my characters. #nonfiction

Thanks to Charlotte Gross for all the help editing! The photos in this post were taken by Katie Hake and Dave Kotz.

“Lately, the landscape has been whispering to me, reminding me what it felt like when my heart loved something other than transience.”

Read Wanderlove Here

Read more of my creative writing here.