Strayed...

I'm very much the kind of person that loves quotes. All sorts. Funny, inspirational, thought provoking, silly ect.... because of this I end up marking and highlighting my books from time to time. Highlighting things that stick out to me in a number of different ways.

So I thought I would share with you a paragraph from I book that read recently called Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

In a short summary, the author, Cheryl Strayed, decides to hike the PCT after a string of hardships that happen in her life. The book chronicles her hardships in life before and during her time on the trail. It's very good if I do say so myself.

ANYWAY

In this section she is talking about the moment during her divorce where she is deciding on what she wants her last name to be...

"I pondered the question of my last name, mentally scanning words that sounded good with Cheryl and making lists of characters from novels I admired. Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately, I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine. Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. 

        I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days-those very days in which I was naming myself-I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before." Pg. 96-97

Anyway, this bit stuck out to me so I thought I would share it. Take from it what you may, and I hope you enjoyed it. :)