Memoir Aspen Matis Quotes

Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope. ~ Aspen Matis

I reached into my pack and held something small in the fist I made. "It's a pocketknife," I said, enunciating each letter. I was asserting myself, I'd snapped out of something; he visibly snapped out of something too. I saw it acutely in his dropping posture: doubt in his movement. I said, "The truck works."

And so it did. ~ Aspen Matis

I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves. ~ Aspen Matis

I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains - I'd mastered a thousand amazing physical feats - physically I'd become undeniably confident and capable - but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature. ~ Aspen Matis

I flushed - this time not in shame - but in rage. ~ Aspen Matis

Happy people have everything to give. ~ Aspen Matis

All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I'd walked, the pain I'd felt, the beauty I'd drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million steps I'd taken, would all add up to nothing. They'd be stolen. ~ Aspen Matis

It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction. ~ Aspen Matis

I don't remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me.
I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me.

I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father's faith in my walk - in me - made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, "She's an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn't mean she's not selfish." He almost understood. ~ Aspen Matis

I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen. ~ Aspen Matis

My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child. ~ Aspen Matis

Second - I'd take much better care of myself.

There were simple things I could do. I could start with my poor feet. These little two feet carried me each day for miles and miles, steady and flexed, tired and aching from constant daily pounding, bruised scratched and sometimes rubbed red-raw, my weight pressing and pressing them. I decided now that each night in my tent I'd massage them. I would knead them with lotion because they always ached, and at the end of thirty-mile days they burned - and it would be luxurious - something I could have done the entire way because I had been carrying sun lotion but had never taken the ten sacred minutes to do for myself. ~ Aspen Matis

The entire time, he'd only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn't the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn't have heard me. He'd never responded, not by stopping, not with his words. ~ Aspen Matis

Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album. ~ Aspen Matis

If I wanted to go to bed at ten o'clock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started walking when I wanted, kept going until precisely when I wanted to stop.

When I was tired, feeling like stopping but wanting to persist, I'd listen to Blood On The Tracks. ~ Aspen Matis

I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love. ~ Aspen Matis

I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic. ~ Aspen Matis

After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing. ~ Aspen Matis

We spent June and July in the Rockies, growing stronger, feeling feral in the untamed range of mountains. ~ Aspen Matis

My parents had lived in California, long ago, when they were twenty and twenty-two, also newly married. This distant knowledge romanced me like a whiff of honey, the sweet and mythic prehistory of my existence. ~ Aspen Matis

The first time I walked alone, thirteen, I was terrified. A twig snapped under my shoe; my heart revved wildly. I'd walked these sidewalks a thousand times with my mom, yet I was scared by all her fears. Don't talk to strangers, walk quickly past parked cars, look both ways, all ways, always. Be alert. There was so damn much to remember to stay safe. ~ Aspen Matis

I knew with certainty now - I could say no, and he would stop. Above all, I felt the fierce beauty of the choice. I knew now what it was that had held me from falling into my desire to be with him fully: I first needed to make sure he was a man who would respect my 'No. ~ Aspen Matis

I was the director of my life, it was already true, and I would soon lead myself to my dreamed-of destinations.

It was the task of my one thousand miles of solitude. ~ Aspen Matis

I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. That was the irreversible reality. ~ Aspen Matis

We were in the woods, and not a parent or a friend on earth knew where. At this moment, we were untraceable, this notion an odd pleasure. A patch of fallen leaves glowed in a pool of golden sun, and the dim forest air smelled sweet, of young lilac, invisible sage. ~ Aspen Matis

The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry. ~ Aspen Matis

On this walk I'd had so much time and space to actually figure out who I was without my mother's influence. I understood now: the things that my mother had found made her happy were not the same as the things that made me happy. And I understood: that was okay. ~ Aspen Matis

After all this time questioning whether I could trust myself, my instinct had proven right - I'd found a path in pathless woods. ~ Aspen Matis

If I was going to put myself into a situation wherein I had no one to depend on, I needed to step up and be the one to actually take good care of myself.The universe wouldn't simply do it for me. ~ Aspen Matis

Mothers are programmed to teach the fit. They are unequipped to listen to pleas, to alter their patterns. Mothers know how to nurse and nurture those who they have hope for - they coo over babies with infections they can help heal, they give advice for things they know, they protect from the dangers they know how to fear. But once their baby becomes so hurt the mother doesn't know how to heal her, she neglects because she doesn't know better. The tricks she knows don't work, she fears, and, eventually, when she is so lost she feels hopeless, she abandons. ~ Aspen Matis

I felt the urge to sprint, my body felt freer striding faster. I was terribly shaken, though nothing bad had happened. Intellectually it seemed that I should want to stay with Icecap and Edison. We had all smoked, I had decided to make myself vulnerable to new men, to trust them, and these boys had proven themselves to be worthy of my trust. They hadn't touched me, nothing bad had happened; I had proven my mother wrong. I had weighed the situation, I'd felt safe, and this had been my chance to remind myself that rape wasn't normal. ~ Aspen Matis

And I thought: What am I doing here? What am I doing here? What am I? I wanted to feel like a pretty girl, even out in Colorado with no one who knew me. To be beautiful. To live beautifully. I drew on maroon Make Me Blush lipstick. ~ Aspen Matis

The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire. ~ Aspen Matis

The true answer held my chest like an unwanted hand's sudden touch, uncomfortable and unfeeling. ~ Aspen Matis

With Icecap the desert no longer felt like a severe and lonely world. It felt pristine and grand, like an ocean we could walk on, bright open water. This was our world, population: two. Whatever we did here would be the culture. The language was English, though words like "rape" and "racing" would fade out of use. ~ Aspen Matis

She told me that my rape was not my fault, that I should feel no shame, that – simple as it may sound – I hadn't caused it. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. It was true. And it had not been obvious to me. And hearing it from someone else, a professional, someone who should know, helped me believe that soon I would believe it. ~ Aspen Matis

I walked, floated, lighter - forty miles, my biggest day yet. I'd lifted the burden of guilt and shame off my body. I held my new hard-won wisdom, the gift three months of walking in the wilderness had carried me to: compassion for my younger self - forgiveness for my innocence. ~ Aspen Matis

A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible but weren't, and so anything - great and terrible - felt possible to me now.

I wondered what else there was out in the world that I had never seen through my lenses. I had speculated about the destination of a nonexistent desert road, I'd kept going. What other magic had I wrongly explained away? I felt like I'd lost something I hadn't ever had.

A thousand things I didn't even know existed had to exist. ~ Aspen Matis

Bright yellow lemons twinkled in the twilight sun on a terrace tree, and far beyond my window, San Francisco lay, flat like a pastel toy. ~ Aspen Matis

When tomorrow broke, our hillside home filled up with honeyed light, a fish tank. ~ Aspen Matis

She was my mirror image, slightly distorted, flipped, older, larger, more able to coexist with a pack of men. I'd be their pawn. She was their queen. ~ Aspen Matis

My beauty and independence were new for me. They brought me pride and satisfaction; they changed my sense of possibility. I felt awake in my body. Living in the woods, building my little shelter each night, a silent shadow, drifting in and out of mountain towns, a ghost, I was entirely self-reliant. On the trail I had persisted despite fear, and walking the Pacific Crest had led me deeply into happiness. I felt amazing now. In this body that brought me twelve hundred miles, I felt I could do anything. ~ Aspen Matis

My body was smarter than I was. I was with someone who would never hurt me, and so I finally relaxed. ~ Aspen Matis

I'd entered the bliss of Washington, physically and emotionally: eating huckleberries, feeling beautiful and finally in control of my self. Feeling the changing season, my self changed. ~ Aspen Matis

Walking in solitude fixes nothing, but it leads you to the place where you can identify the malady - see the wound's true form and nature - and then discern the proper medicine.

My malady was submission.

The symptom: my compliance.

The antidote was loud clear boundaries. ~ Aspen Matis

A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame, down into the calm blue lake. A gust had broken it free. There was a cold bite in the wind.
It was now deep autumn in the mountains. ~ Aspen Matis

The block of sky in our twin high windows became a nectarine, amber and rose pink, and we lay in silence as white sunlight broke. ~ Aspen Matis

I told myself that my separation from Dash was necessary. I couldn't wreck my hike for anyone, not Dash, no one. I knew this now. ~ Aspen Matis

Seamless like a fall leaf changing color, my will switched powerfully. ~ Aspen Matis

Smiling at an echo of his voice on my mind's stage, I felt the void of all I hadn't said. ~ Aspen Matis

I realized she was finding Junior innocent of rape. That meant that I was guilty of lying. ~ Aspen Matis

I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough. ~ Aspen Matis

I was so much more powerful than anyone knew. I was an animal learning to fight back, instinctively, fiercely. I was a brave girl. I was a fit fox.

I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself. ~ Aspen Matis

Beautiful prairies, bordered by lofty hills sparsely scattered with timber, stretch around. The massive fronds of the Pinus Ponderosa replace the elegant leaflets of the Cedar, no longer found save rarely, perchance, in some deep dell moistened by a purling streamlet. Groves of aspen appear here and there. The Balsam Poplar shows itself at intervals only, along the streams. The white racemes of the Service-berry flower, and the chaste flowers of the Mock Orange, load the air with their fragrance. Every copse re-echoes with the low drumming of the ruffed Grouse; the trees resound with the muffled booming of the Cock of the Woods. The Pheasant shirrs past; the scrannel-pipe of the larger Crane -- ever a watchful sentinel -- grates harshly on the ear; and the shrill whistle of the Curlew as it soars aloft aides the general concert of the re-opined year. I speak still of Spring; for the impressions of that jocum season are ever the most vivid, and naturally recur with the greatest force in after years. -- Alexander Caulfield Anderson describing the new brigade trail between Lac la Hache and Kamloops. ~ Nancy Marguerite Anderson

Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized. ~ Mark Rowlands

Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult. ~ Darin Strauss

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners ... ~ Natalie Goldberg

Anyone with an autobiography is almost definitely an evil piece of shit. ~ Brian K. Vaughan