She always was the adventurous type.

Gathering up the bottom hem, she bunched her loosely draped skirt so as not to get caught on any wayward branches.  Trampling over brittle twigs in her brown slouchy boots, she ventured deeper and deeper into the forrest as her house, her safety and security faded into the background.

“What will today’s adventure bring?” she thought, “A new type of flower?  A never before seen kind of butterfly?  A cookie factory run by elves in the trunk of a tree?”  All thoughts and possibilities fluttered about in her whimsical imagination just like the butterflies she fancied and hoped to see.

Farther inward she trekked through the unfamiliar, fueled by both the most intense eagerness and care.  She stopped.  She looked.  She listened.  The rustling leaves whispered sweet secrets to her as she took refreshment in their shadows.  She could feel it.  She was close.  She was onto something.

Then all of a sudden, there it was!  Right there!  A discovery far beyond anything she had ever known or could even begin to liken it to.  Something wildly beyond belief and yet there in front of her–her discovery.

And with it came the most spectacular high of beholding something so new and so astonishing and so wondrous and otherworldly, but also with it, the most maddening frustration that not a single soul would ever fully know exactly what she was seeing and experiencing, regardless of how articulate her descriptions or persistent her efforts were.

And though less from a voluntary spirit and more of an objective lack of other options, she cautiously placed the discovery into the basket of her mind and memoirs and continued on, every future find to follow in the same manner.

After all, this was her adventure.  Herein was being penned the story she would have to live with for the rest of her life. And with time pushing forward as a relentless beast, she had no choice but to proceed one step in front of the other–right, left, right, left, right, left–just her and her basket and a hope that one day someone might know and appreciate the contents inside.

“When you’re with someone else, you share each discovery, but when you are alone, you have to carry each experience with you like a secret, something you have to write on your heart, because there’s no other way to preserve it.”  [Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines 57]