Trail Journal, February 2025: A poetic and inevitable rainfall
Back story: I’m with the girls’ band. We made it to this week’s “Final D” (final destination) and have set up camp at the foot of a small mountain in the Arizona high desert. We are tucked into a hillside juniper grove just above a running stream.
The sky is grey and foreboding. It growled for a while, and now hovers, threatening to drop itself into liquid over our heads. We rigged up our group tarp over the fire area in preparation for the coming rain. I count at least 30 holes in it, and those are only the visible ones. R (fellow TrailWalker) & I are journaling. H (YoungWalker) is writing letters to her family after sitting with her Shadow (therapist). Shadow is now sitting with M – the quiet, shy one. She’s been giving up on fire-making after a few days of trying and failing. I get it – learning to make fire can be one of the hardest things we do out here. And there’s no way to shortcut or cheat the process. It takes what it takes. Like many things worth doing in Life.
…
Some time passes. Sure enough, the rain comes. By now we are huddled fireside together underneath our dripping tarp. We steel ourselves and make a mad dash to collect wood before the water soaks too deeply in. Everything here hangs in a strange and perfect balance – now there is a large piece of wood at the back of the wood pile, and its placement is just right for me to step on it, reach up, and raise one of the drooping corners of our overhead tarp, giving us all a bit more headroom. A moment of small but deep satisfaction amidst our wet conundrum.
…
The YoungWalkers are now cooking lentils over the open fire. R sits beside me carving a spoon. The pitter-patter over our heads is peaceful, gentle. We are like a makeshift family, huddled together in a temporary living room, pressed up against the elements, Nature’s very bosom.
On the Menu Today in Today’s Post:
- Part 1: My Story of Finding and Walking with Anasazi
- Part 2: Collage of Trail Journal Entries & Quotes
- Final Thoughts
Part 1: My Story of Finding and Walking with Anasazi
In October 2024 I moved to Arizona to work for the Anasazi Foundation. Anasazi runs a yearlong wilderness therapy program for teens and young adults, accepting people on a rolling basis for a 49-day nomadic wilderness experience that has the power to transform hearts and lives.
Why Wilderness Therapy?
Wilderness therapy as a concept always made sense to me, since I’ve felt firsthand a deep therapeutic benefit from my own wilderness experiences. Nature has been the most powerful tool in my toolkit for most of my life. It’s been a healthy and effective place to turn to when I’ve been upset or disregulated, even when I haven’t had the understanding or words to describe what I’m going through or what I need.
I grew up with a strong connection to the natural world, thanks to my parents and especially my mom. She took us on hiking and camping trips all through my childhood, and when I was 12 years old she moved us to a farm next to a thousand-acre plot of open land in the Sierra foothills. Whenever I went through rough patches at home, I would run out the door and go be outside in the elements. I found inner peace in hiking and running, surrounded by oak and pine trees, jagged and lichen-dotted rocks, and fresh air. Nature seemed to help pull the “ick” out of me when I felt broken… It pulled me outside of myself, without the influence of other people’s thoughts and emotions.
Later on, I found my favorite group dynamics with peers inside nature-oriented activities.
I remember riotously laughing with friends in the middle of the night when I was in high school, dancing around a bonfire and skinny dipping while camping out by our beloved local river.
I remember my first backpacking trip, after graduating high school, and the sense of satisfaction that came from carrying all my belongings on my back and making camp somewhere new every day.
When I left home and went to Duke for college, I was across the country from my family and everything I’d ever known. At Duke, nothing came close to the feeling of belonging I felt with my backpacking community, Project WILD. We had all been accepted into a competitive, elite University, and traveled from different corners of the US and beyond to come meet our destiny. This made for a social landscape that triggered deep insecurities in many of us! Yet out there in the woods, our egos were somehow left behind, and we could connect as humans and as wild creatures.
For the cost of withstanding the elements together, we were given Freedom! Freedom from the tyranny of the world’s expectations and rules! Freedom from our own fears of discomfort. When a downpour comes and you have nowhere to hide, you learn to embrace it and to find joy and humor in it. I would return from our trips with a greater feeling of wholeness inside myself and a greater ability to face the challenges in front of me at school.
Somehow along the way, I learned that I was somewhat unique in my wiring among my peers; unique to be so comfortable in Nature and with wildness. Unique to be able to smile when the rain comes unexpected on a hike. I learned that many or most of modern humans see Nature as something foreign and harsh and uncomfortable, and haven’t benefited from the same access to Nature that I’ve had through my life. Even if we all come from the land, and from indigenous cultures who lived close to the land, most of us modern humans have lost our connection to those roots. Even me, even the ones who do feel at peace when out camping rather than scared.
Fast forward to today, and to “wilderness therapy”… it seemed to me to be such an obviously good idea, to answer this unmet need of a people who have become collectively disconnected from Nature as a healing force.
Exploring Truthful and Good-Spirited Work: Can it Make a Difference in the World?
I came to Anasazi in a place of life transition. I’d created a blank canvas in my work life after quitting the corporate tech world, and I’d been called out here to the desert by the part of me longing to find a better path for myself in service to healing for myself and the world.
Maybe it’s a different kind of selfishness to wish for work that actually amounts to something positive for the world at large. That’s a different kind of currency than money, currency of the heart and soul. I wonder if on some level I am working to atone for the corporate machine that runs the world in a less-than-human-centric way, seemingly.
Now I’m here, and I find myself asking: Is it working?
The job gives me plenty to despair over. I get to see so much mental and emotional illness up-close, and it can be easy to wonder, in the harder moments, if the accumulated effect of all our effort at Anasazi is “worth it” – if it’s not just a drop in a bucket of water, amidst a downpour that is raging into a flood of destruction, far beyond our reach.
I grapple with doubt some days. I don’t know how long Anasazi, and Wilderness Therapy as a whole, will survive. Many other great organizations got swept away in a flood of destruction, in a tidal wave of criticism against the industry and its perceived malpractices and pitfalls (some of which were and are very real). Anasazi may be clean from some or all of those specific criticisms, yet has had its lowest enrollment ever in recent months.
One thing that’s struck me, while I’ve been deeply benefiting from this program and seeing others benefit from it… there’s still no guarantee that it will survive and thrive, just because it is Good with a capital G in my book. For the first time in my life, I feel myself allied with a force for Good-with-a-capital-G… and I fear that my participation here could ultimately be a vote cast for sanity that gets entirely missed by the sinking titanic of our culture-at-large. A culture that has normalized spending nearly 7 hours a day on a screen (according to my Google search today), living surrounded by concrete and plastic and traffic noise, and the widespread epidemics of addiction, loneliness, and mental health disorders. So many people could benefit from this or something like it, and yet may never see it or be able to see it for what it is.
If my being here is anything, it’s an active prayer for my own soul, for our country, for family health, and for the modern human’s connection with the natural world. It feels REALLY good to choose a living prayer for a lifestyle. I don’t really know what else to call it. Even with all my uncertainties, it feels at least truthful to my spirit.
I know that working this way makes a difference to me, and to the people I work with. How it ripples out beyond that, and what happens in the world at large, is beyond my control. That’s always going to be true, and it’s okay.
Changing My Walking in Life for the Better
The Anasazi program calls itself the “Making of a Walking”. What we learn and practice out in the wilderness is a way of Walking that is harmonious with nature and one another.
“Walking as We”
On the trail, there is no escaping our dependence on each other and on the elements around us. We need to find water sources for drinking; we need to know the plants in order to work with them for fire-making and other crafts; we need to ultimately befriend the natural world, in order to live inside of it. As we do, we learn that harmony is actually the path of least resistance and highest personal and collective wellbeing.
At Anasazi, we talk about “Walking as We” instead of separately as pure individuals. This is the best orientation of the heart, in life. To hold the wellbeing of “all of us” in all that we do. To actively seek out how to be helpful and collaborative with our peers.
Like the story I shared at the beginning of this post – when the rain is about to come, the most harmonious thing is to work together to put up our tarp and gather wood for the fire, and then to simply be in the experience together. That could have been an emotionally dramatic moment. I’ve had many emotionally dramatic moments out on the trail where the simple group harmony isn’t happening because one or more people are unable or unwilling to participate in a positive response to what Nature is offering. We have to learn to soften the parts of ourselves that get in the way of that harmony. We have to show up for the people around us as much as for ourselves.
The ultimate goal of a program like this isn’t to turn people onto a primitive style of wilderness living forever. But we can practice this way of walking, out in Nature – in an environment that teaches it to us so clearly – and then bring it back with us into the modern world. The lessons stay the same; the right orientation of heart is still the same, no matter our environment. We can work on the way we walk inwardly. We can cultivate living with a heart at peace towards all around us, and the ability to walk forward harmoniously (”walk as WE”) in our lives, wherever we are.
Seeds of Greatness: What You Focus on Grows
One of the most important parts of a TrailWalker’s job is to pay attention to what we call “Seeds of Greatness” in others. We don’t look at the young people in our care as troubled or defective – we see them as gifted and inherently valuable, and we work hard to focus on their positive attributes and efforts.
I’ve seen some real magic happen on trail when a seasoned TrailWalker refuses to react negatively to some teenager’s outburst or refusal to act harmoniously in a given situation… refuses to play into a cycle of hostility and criticism, refuses to try to control or manipulate. We instead make ourselves available as a resource, and we speak with genuine kindness and appreciation to those in our care. We trust that they will grow positively forward in their own way, and we let that happen on their terms. I’m not so good at this yet, but I’ve seen it in action and the results have blown me away — challenging kids completely transforming their attitudes and behavior from vulgar and hostile into soft, warm, and generous. And maybe it isn’t a permanent shift immediately, but you stack up a bunch of small moments like that, and it may actually become the beginning of a lasting change of heart.
When I’m not sure how to act with a young person out there, I keep coming back to this basic idea. I redirect my efforts to look for their Seeds of Greatness, and to reflect back to them what I see.
Incidentally, I’ve started trying to practice this out in my life, with the people in my life. And guess what? It’s difficult for me to speak only from kindness and not from criticism or sarcasm. It feels vulnerable. It almost feels disingenuous – and it could be, I suppose, except that it only works if it’s authentic. Fake compliments don’t cut it. This one takes dedicated practice and an earnest heart.
Part 2: Collage of Trail Journal Entries & Quotes
March 2025 – Working in the Business of Miracles
In my old life I was more or less sheltered from these aspects of reality I’m now seeing on a daily basis. My university education and tech-centered working environments were conspicuously absent of children and family life, and far removed from broader concerns of society at large around general human wellbeing and mental health.
In that corporate tech ecosystem, some part of me always felt like we were focusing on the wrong things together. How can it be good to be further developing technologies that power our connectivity to one another via the Internet, when our access to and dependence on the Internet seemingly comes at the cost of so many aspects of our collective wellbeing? I felt this on an intuitive level – that as we digitalize and virtualize our lives, we seem to get farther away from a true state of wellbeing and harmony with Nature, or Reality itself.
Now, I see the consequences of our tech-saturated world firsthand. I work with these teens who, it seems, have never had space to develop their own thoughts, as they’ve been completely bombarded and hijacked by the ceaseless stream of social media – and a kind of competitive, cutthroat frenzy that goes along with it.
One girl I walked with had a full-blown Snapchat addiction. I don’t say that lightly. It completely got between her and her family (and arguably between her and herself), and became the primary, urgent focus of her life. Her behavior around it was enough of a problem that her family deemed their situation worthy of a seven-week wilderness intervention.
Over the course of her walking, I watched her transform. I saw her discover herself on a deeper level and come to a place of peace with her wilderness walking and her life story. I watched the light come back into her eyes through her awakenings and her changes of heart.
That was a miracle. Anasazi is in the business of soul-level miracles. And I get to be a part of that! Talk about a full 180-degree turn from my life as it used to be.
TrailWalker Quotes
- P: “There’s so much news about how bad the world is… but everywhere I go, I mostly see good people!”
- V: “I just never found a place where I was happier, than out here in the desert. So I keep coming back.”
- S: (Looking down a cliff we may need to climb down) “Well, it’s definitely try-able!”
- A: “well… I always say, you can’t hide from the mountain, she always reveals your truest self – and in the end, you might be surprised at how strong you actually are.”
Micro Moment from the trail… “Learning to Trust the Process”
background: A fuzzy emotional scene of teenage psychological chaos and dysfunction in the high desert wilderness
foreground: An exchange between two TrailWalkers trying to see the way forward
mood: despondency finding its way to acceptance and hope
Me:
I’m struggling – this seems all wrong. The kids aren’t choosing to be here, they see it as a punishment instead of an opportunity. They can’t see the good in this place, they see us as the bad guys. They keep walking backwards! I feel helpless and wonder if any of this is doing any good at all.
P (a TrailWalker who’s been out here a lot longer than me):
I felt that way, too… one thing that helped me was meeting people who showed me otherwise. One friend of mine, I knew him before I worked at Anasazi. So he knew this place because he’d done the program as a teen. He said it helped him, but he just didn’t get it right away. He got sent to the program, left, went back to the drugs and his old ways… but something clicked a couple years later. He saw his experience in a deeper way… and the lessons blossomed. He changed his ways, and became thankful. Same story with some of the TrailWalkers I’ve walked with, who were YoungWalkers in the past – didn’t choose Anasazi, didn’t love it – but it ended up changing their lives anyway. So I believe in this, and sometimes it just takes time.
July 2025: Final Days Magic
It’s my last week on the trail, and I’ve been gifted with the experience of being a “Wind Walker” – now, instead of dedicating my week to walking with a single band, I get to “walk with the wind”… to travel between bands, wherever I may be needed.
I walked into the girls band tonight – they are still at their last “Final D” (the ‘final destination’ which changes week to week), and are going through some changes in the band, with people coming and going. I made it to them at dinner time, where everyone is huddled around the fire and cooking. T is excited because we’ll have time to sing together again tonight. There are a couple new girls who I am meeting for the first time.
As dusk falls, some of us linger to sing as the stars start to make their way forward. T and I have our favorites, from weeks past, our known harmonies.
A rustling catches my ear from the bushes nearby… and a friendly, warm voice. “Can I join you?” Another TrailWalker! One I haven’t walked with yet, but whose presence I enjoy. Let’s call him “S”.
He listens to our harmonies, and then, gift of gifts, offers his own sweet voice to the night in the form of two trail songs that I’d never heard. He teaches us line by line, in a call-and-response format. And then we are singing sweet trail songs together.
What is it that makes this moment so special? This raw, direct process of sharing our aliveness, learning, feeling, and expressing together.
I will forever have the singing voices of certain YoungWalkers and TrailWalkers in my heart. Almost nothing in the world is more magical to me than those moments, the simplicity and earnestness of harmonizing our musical voices together into the night, with the bugs and the moon and the fire. No artificial light or sound. No distraction. Pure. Angelic.
Final Thoughts
I have a deep love for Anasazi, and left on good terms with an open heart about the future. I hope to go back as a “Guest Walker” one day… maybe once I’ve got my bodywork practice into a rhythm that makes sense, the Trail will call me back. Until then, good work and Godspeed!
This piece was a bit of a ramble, but I hope that it serves as an interesting window into my TrailWalking journey for whoever can benefit from it. I’m always happy to talk more about my time in the desert. If you’re curious to hear about something specific, let me know!
Thanks for reading 🙏
Expressions from this side of the here & now 
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