Somewhere over Japan

Battambang, Cambodia

Middle Gobi, Mongolia

Along the Ring Road, Iceland

Along the Ring Road, Iceland

South Gobi, Mongolia

Siem Reap, Cambodia

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Near and far from Lhasa, Tibet

Roads to Everest

Siem Reap, Cambodia

Paro, Bhutan

Along the Ring Road, Iceland

Along the Friendship Highway, Tibet

Westfjords, Iceland

Jökulsárlón, Iceland

Mount Batur, Indonesia

In climbing Khongoryn Els, it is far better to crawl. On all fours, one limb at a time, barefoot, breathing. This will be over soon, I thought. I was a different kind of tired now, a new sort of weary, at once beaten down and energized from months of drifting on the wind. The climb filled me with fire, as if I was clawing for something vital in the sand. For days I had been floating on a perfect current of air, and I did not trust the ground the way I trusted the wind. Or the way I trusted this deep refusal of what I feared lay ahead, the thing I know now as stillness, as a departure from the breeze I had drifted in on. Don’t leave me here on Earth.

The sand kept moving underneath me. The grains flowed like water and swirled in the air. I took a step forward and slid back down. To a woman resting on the dune, apparently tired of stepping and sliding, I said excitedly, “Can you believe this?” And my chest crushed when she said, “What’s the point of this?” But I was elated. “Look how far we’ve come,” I said, slowing, turning around, seeing for myself and growing giddy. “It doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere, but look how far we’ve come.”

I reached the top of the dune on a burst of vigor. The wind was howling now, the sand stinging and singing, the sun sinking, its color deepening, the endless sky darkening. My mind slowed. I sat and just cried into my sweat, looking down at the powdery sand longingly, lovingly, even as it whipped my skin. I stared at many golden miles of sand settled into mounds like the one I had just climbed. This will be over soon.

Pokhara, Nepal

Pai, Thailand

Under a neon glow in a motel parking lot, I’m a cliché of a waiting someone inside of her rental car, watching ice on the windshield become water on the hood. It’s late enough to be early, it’s cold enough to wear everything I’ve brought. Soon the fluorescence fades behind me and speed limits become blurs. At an intersection of one, I look up and something in my chest leaps to my throat. My body shrinks itself or I shrink into my body, folding into a shape carved by the force I feel through glass and metal. The stars. I step into silence so full that my ears ring, my breaths echo, even my motions, slight as they are, wax profane as they cut through stillness. An eagerness to gaze without the glass filter swells. The stars. But I don’t dare. Not yet. Because, I reason, finally looking means facing expectation—of seeing less than I hoped or more than I imagined—and from that comes a fear of giving in to the overwhelming largeness of my smallness, of the space between me and my self that I have worked so hard to nurture. Instead I watch what the dark has let me have of the ground, transfer my weight until it doesn’t feel like mine. And when my hands have warmed inside my pockets and the quiet brings to mind a voice I used to know, I close my eyes and tilt my head back. It’s green and blue behind here, streaky and shimmery. Then I open them. Inhale sharply. Let tears escape. The fear, I notice, is gone. Hope and humility are in its place now, a sense of servitude to a universe I’ve been resisting. In between falling meteors, I find my long-lost wonder; against a prehistoric silhouette, I accept a fullness I’ve refused. Surrender my weapons, empty my hands, offer vulnerable miles of skin. I give in to the celestial assurance that, in this moment, I simply exist.

Battambang, Cambodia

Reynisfjara, Iceland

He says it was a brain tumor and that he wanted to learn everything he could about what was happening inside her. A whisper of sadness passes over his face the way a cloud crosses paths with the sun. Not apparent enough to respond to it, but enough to barely feel it, like walking through a strand of silken thread. A squirrel scrambles into his backpack and then emerges. "He's looking for my cashews." We watch this scene with dazed half smiles, seemingly relieved to pause homeward realities. "We tend to think lazy thoughts," he says. "Lazy thinking requires less energy of the brain. It's technically more efficient." A neuroscientist, he tells me. That's what he is.

"Is it a learned behavior? Does the brain make it a habit to think lazily?" I want to know.

Index finger up, eyes wide, shoulders squared. "The brain is hardwired for extremely complex thoughts and emotions. Yes, processing them requires more energy, but it's what we're built for." 

I cling to this concept like fading love and the squirrel darts between boulders.

"I hope you find what you're looking for," he says, as if I told him I had lost something. Or maybe he was talking to the squirrel.

En route, Bhutan

South Gobi, Mongolia

From the confines of a chrysalis in a frozen reprieve, I see life beyond breaths that would go unnoticed in warm air. In this place, there's hope without resignation, though it doesn’t shine like the sun in the summer and it doesn’t pull the way you expect it to when you’ve nearly given up. Instead it rolls in on fog, crystallizes on branches, alights on shoulders. Hope here is a fragile fight, one that's silent and steady, persistent and palpable.