One Month Out: The Yoga of the In-Between

I am one month out from stepping foot onto the Pacific Crest Trail - and that has its own kind of wild: liminal, electric, uncomfortable, sacred. 

I keep trying to imagine that first step,  I know it’s coming. I know it will be real. I just can’t quite touch it yet. What I can feel is this strange, stretched-thin in-between. 

My wild thru-hiker friends light up when I talk about the trail. I can see the thrill in their eyes, they are living through me in some capacity. I feel like I am carrying all of our collective anticipation in my pack already.

And then there are my non-trail friends. The ones who tilt their heads and ask, “But… why?”
The ones who look at me like I have calmly announced I will be walking to Canada for fun... To them, this is unimaginable, unnecessary. Maybe a little unhinged. Somewhere in the middle of all that, there is me.

All I want to talk about is trail. Every conversation somehow bends back toward miles, gear, snowpack, resupply boxes. I am already there in my mind. And at the exact same time, all I want is to not talk trail…. to protect it. To hold it close and sacred and unexamined. Because every time I try to explain it, it shrinks. It becomes something logistical instead of something spiritual and an adventure.

It is both everything and too fragile for words. 

And maybe that’s where yoga has been my quiet companion in all of this. A decade of learning to stay:
in discomfort,
in uncertainty,
in breath that feels too tight,
in moments that feel like they might split me open.

Yoga has taught me how to hold the in-between. How to listen to the parts of myself that whisper beneath the noise. How to sit with anticipation without trying to solve it or shrink it or turn it into something more digestible.

On my mat, I learned the discipline of returning to presence, again and again - of meeting myself honestly, even when the ground beneath me felt unsteady. That same practice is what is letting me stand here now, in this stretched thin month before everything, without trying to rush through it.

The trail will ask for endurance, strength, grit.
And this moment - the one right before the beginning - asks for something softer: the ability to stay with what is - presence. Yoga has taught me that. It is the thread that is helping me hold the wild, electric sacredness of this in-between without breaking it open too soon.

All I can do now is keep showing up - training, on my mat, in my breath, until it’s time to take my first step on the Pacific Crest Trail... One Month Out.