Wandering North: An Arrow Without a Target

[August 5, 2025: Today was nothing short of incredible. I lay in my tent now, after a 13 hour day spent wandering through Tuolumne meadows. Zach reminded me I’ve been here once, when I was in high school; but that was just a pitstop at the famous waterfall overlook and doesn’t count in my book. Today was really my first day here in a meaningful sense, a day which will remain with me for the rest of my life. Perhaps between words and photos I can convey some of this, but ultimately I know there is no substitute for having feet on the ground and eyes in the sky. Certainly, whatever “God” is shines through this land; it is perhaps the fullest expression of earthly divinity known to man.]

There’s something about an open road.

Cruising up 395 with three-quarters of a tank of gas and an unknown destination ahead, I chatted with my good friend Danny, who was walking through the woods in Maine, near a lake not far from the Canadian border. Although I didn’t know exactly where I was headed, I was bound for the High Sierras– that much I knew. Sometimes (often) I wish that I was better at choosing a definitive target, had a more exact vision of what I was aiming at. For much of my life this kind of clarity has eluded me, and the more I strain my eyes to find it the more I’m sent spinning, too dizzy even to take a step forward. So for better or for worse, I’ve learned to lean into the direction of the moment and to practice contentment wherever I end up. Spiritually, this is one of the most important practices of my life; materially, however…well, suffice it to say that I would have preferred to hit the road with a full tank of gas. Easier to wander (and harder to have a destination) when you don’t know how far you can go, I suppose.

Danny is perhaps the best ambler I know; not many people I’ve met share my joy in an aimless walk or a thoughtless stroll. In another life, I wonder, when people were perhaps a bit closer to their nature, we could have been H.D. Thoreau and John Muir. In that life, naturalists went camping with the president of the United States and discussed philosophy instead of ideology. But civilization has taken its toll. In this life, the very preservation of the wild which Muir so strongly advocated for is being undone by the same institution which allowed Theodore Roosevelt to act upon it in the first place. I would be naive to pretend there’s no risk that this land towards which I’m moving will one day be gone. and by some stroke of luck I decided it was worthwhile to drive six hours up the coast in order to spend one day in this divine swath of land of which I had only yet heard.

Coffee cart in a town of 600 people, resting in the shadow of the Sierras…maybe this was my destination all along.

I’ve seen many photos of the valley, but they tend to be paired with “photos will never do it justice” (I can now confirm this sentiment). Even so, a backpack filled with camera gear rode alongside me in the passenger seat. On this journey, Fujifilm would be my copilot.

An image may never be able to capture the full experience of hiking through the wild valleys of the Sierra Nevadas, full with their rivers and falls and meadows, alpine lakes and forests of pine. Still, perhaps this is another way we can preserve the land, at least to some extent. In a world where I’m no longer able to take a day to drive to the Yosemite Valley, wouldn’t a fraction of that experience be better than none at all? If a future arrives where industry has prevailed at the cost of the environment, could we still step through an image to take part in the hidden conversation of our nature?

The spontaneity of this trip left me comically unprepared for the whole permits-in-the-park situation. I pulled off the road about 25 minutes south of the valley and found a nice lakefront overlook for the night where I’d be free to camp. Even with about two and a half hours of daylight left, I went straight to work setting up. For me this is a sort of ritual, a symbolic signal to my body that it’s time to shed a layer or two and step through to another experience of life. Staking ground in the earth, we claim home for ourselves, and I think our body feels this descent into the wild. I suspect that we all secretly revel in this, even if we tend to forget it. Walk out the door and it won’t take long to remember.

Later, as I lay flat on the cool earth, with stars beginning to appear overhead and a gas-tank moon making its way across the sky, I thought of the doe that I saw on my walkabout after I first arrived at the overlook. As I came down the hill she spotted me, peering up from the brush, the two fawns at her side a bit slower to react. They moved slightly, carefully but without much concern; it was 5:45pm and the sun entered its final hour before dipping beyond the surrounding mountains. It was the perfect image of life itself, a mother guiding her children into the world as daylight descended— an image so deeply ingrained in our being that we can’t help but to stop and marvel. So that’s exactly what I did.

I thought of my own mom, and a line she used to quote from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet:

“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are shot forth.”

All of a sudden the deer began to run, or rather bound, up the hill and further into the woods. A dark blur flashed through the grass in the distance and I swung my lens up to get a better look– a coyote, maybe? I was barely an hour into my walk and still had one foot in civilization…I wasn’t quite ready to witness this chase unfold. As the grass turned to dirt, a cloud of dust rose into the air and two dogs emerged, chasing the deer well out of sight. Their owner followed, imploring them to return. The dogs eventually came back, apparently satisfied with the chase, simply having wanted to experience the thrill of the hunt. I think we all want to experience that to some degree. But what we desire and what we only want to desire are two distinctly different targets. So where do we aim? We can go on wanting for our entire lives, and in the end we’ll inevitably hit our mark. Is that the best we can do?

Everything I’ve experienced so far has shown me that it is only when we aim beyond the target that we begin to fly forever.

It is still dusk as I lay there, and a sound outside my tent pulls me from my thoughts. I look out and see a small bird hopping around me, in a way that feels almost like he is keeping watch. Maybe in the past humans had fed him snacks and he was feeling hopeful. Whatever the case, it was nice to have a companion for the evening. How quickly nature greets us when we finally arrive. It is as if my own nature speaks through me to the world and shares in an ongoing conversation which largely takes place beyond my awareness. Surely I hear it when I listen; and when I listen honestly, I become it, myself a natural expression of this living conversation.

and the more deeply I listen the more clearly I begin to find companionship in all things– not just my avian guardian but the bush, the trees, the rocks and the wind, even in my own feelings of uncertainty. I hear God’s whisper on the breeze, and when I let go of my own language I suddenly understand the song being sung amidst the towering pines. It speaks in the ancient language of our common nature.

One of the most profound aspects of the medicine of the wild is how readily it reaches through all of my concepts of self and communes directly with my core. Nature refuses to let me forget who I am. Lost in the song, I fall asleep with a smile.