In April, I was escaping; but from what was uncertain. Two years had passed while I wasted nights in a dumpy hotel room by Venice Beach, my temporary move of convenience morphing into a lifestyle. Being a writer, I felt like a cliché, and some of those nights the cliché was the only part I still knew. I needed out, out of the hotel and out of my unrecognizable skin. Out. Out. Out.

I looked up, to the skyscrapers and hip bars of Downtown LA, where rooftops are sold as communities. I looked out, to west LA with its proximity to everything and relevance to nothing. I’d already done a year there, commuting a constant, a sentence that prompted me to walk 3000 miles away. The shades on the city map all blended together, as if the neighborhood borders were drawn in crayon, bleeding into one another. I’d be doubling down on the parts of Los Angeles that were dimming my spirit. They were wrong paths.

I didn’t seem to fit into any of the shapes on the pegboard, my own corners and edges worn smooth by doubt and convenience. I’d stopped walking, literally and figuratively, to the exalted point of exhaustion, face down on the grass with free flowing tears for having run out of mountains to climb. The days of walking with confidence, with no endpoint were receding behind me. Outside.

It was only after I recalled my favorite self, daring and fearless, creative with Beginner’s Mind, shepherd of the roadway, that the call became clear. Return to nature. It was then my skin was recognizable again, its pigment flush with rushing blood; it stretched around my lifted shoulders and accommodated my racing heart. I recognized myself in the mirror again, my edges sharp and corners restored. It was only then that a friend remarked, “I could see you in Topanga.”

It’s here that I live more deliberately, finding joy in the doing, the journey, the walking. My days are spent hiking crestlines with vistas to the sea, my nights communing with the unseen. Masked for most of the day behind blinding sunlight, a shy orchestra in the brush sounds outside my cabin at night. Rather than falling asleep to the sound of drunken hipsters, I close my eyes to the call of coyotes and the ruminations of spotted owl. All outside. Where I was alone amid the transient chaos of a bustling hotel, I am now surrounded by community, friends and my love, Dolphina, who arrived with the summer wind, when the days were longest and the sun reluctant to close the lid on the natural spoils embracing us. I’ve been looking for her my entire life and there she was, just down the road, in Topanga.

Once again I stand erect and I like the reflection that I see, this time in the puddles and creeks and rock-lined swimming holes. I’m still in LA, but a world away. All I had to do was walk outside.