I have a favorite conversation with a friend in the city. It happens cyclically, seasonally, almost always after she’s survived a stint in bleating gridlocked traffic or a long spell of grey weather against grey buildings.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” she says, exasperated. “It’s too much. Too loud. Too busy.”

I’ve been walking with my father my entire life and long after his ended. I love him. I love him so much that he’s the tender earth, the laughter of particular birds, the moon and sun’s needless squabble over the sky in the last true minutes of morning. I love him so much that I started walking, by chance or design, on his birthday.

In this journey, I have shed many things that defined me. It has been scary. And hard. And sad. And wobbly. But I had my walking practice. Or it had me. Held me. Loved me. Honored the space I needed. I walked and walked and walked into the arms of the earth and into me. This me.

It’s winter. Not just any kind of winter, but January, a month that stings all the way through. 5 am is harder today than it was yesterday. My muscles are strung tightly, and my eyes are still filled with sleep. Silenced by the snow,  the world can only gesture a “good morning,” which it does with a single brown bird.

As a child, I was quite free-range. Then, like many adults, I lost touch with it. My life back then was wonderful and average. I was happy, but I wasn’t whole. But if I didn’t do something, I knew the part of me that was missing would be gone forever.