Thank you to all of my unlikely teachers— the mountain, the twin eagles flying in tandem at the summit, the Yuba River, the chaplain, the running Frenchman from the ashram, the meowing cats pawing at the door, the cold wooden pews in the old church in Zalbadika, the forgetting, the remembering, the oak root, the moss, the mycelium, the homeless men on the curbs clipping their toenails into the gutters, the gypsies and the beggars and the pickpockets and the street sweepers hosing down the city sidewalks in green neon jumpers at 6am. Thank you for the refuge of the forest. Thank you to the friends that never stop writing. Thank you to the piano players and the street artists and the man that feeds the ducks at Lac Daumesnil every night before the sun sets. I’ve said it to myself everyday since the beginning of September: surround yourself with things that cause the muscle of the heart to spontaneously open. This is how it will learn.

It had never been that cold in June. Our hands stuffed in our pockets, red and numb, wrapped in the thin sleeves of our jackets. But it was better than the heat. On day seven we tied skirts around our faces and scarves around our necks to protect our soft winter skin from the sun. But that morning, in the cool gray fog of dawn, the distant lights of León led us through the empty hills of the Meseta and down into the sleeping streets of the city.

Someone asked me what surprised me most about the walk. All of the roses, I thought. The way they grow wild everywhere, fierce and untamed. Up the sides of houses, through the iron bars of cottage gates, out from the tall, dry grass at the edges of narrow alleys.

Five hours would go by and we’d have no sense of it. A moment would expand into eternity and then collapse into an instant. And there we were, just walking, and breathing, and listening. Sometimes we’d look up from the gravel road and see that the clouds were swirling out in different directions and we’d remember what it was like as kids lying in the grass pretending there was a story unfolding within them. A story much bigger than us, one where dragons turned into teapots and then dissolved like magic into the blue ocean behind them. We slept in cheap shaky bunk beds and washed our dirty clothes with shampoo in stone sinks in the garden. And we all told the truth about not knowing what to do after all of it. It was a great place to be lost. And to be honest about being lost. And to be free. We didn’t know whose lives we were living anymore. They didn’t look like the ones we left back home. Even our faces started to change. And yet it all felt familiar somehow, like we’d been here before. And maybe we had. Not here in the country, and not here with each other, but here in the slow, still beating of our wonder.