Lost In the Trees With a Star Wars Book In My Backpack

Everything you carry with you matters.

I do not belong in nature; I am most comfortable wrapped in a blanket with a book in my lap and a mug of something hot in my hand. But the world is cruel and draining, and I had to escape it.

So I folded my blanket and left my favorite mug in the kitchen sink. I wrapped the closest Star Wars book in a T-shirt and stuffed it into my backpack. My family and I—two of us, plus a Siberian Husky who sleeps best sprawled out on well-loved couches—packed up as few items as we could and drove to the nearest state park for the weekend.

The world may be cruel and draining, but content creation is an organ, we can no longer survive without it even in the wilderness. My husband recorded a TikTok of our dog happily trotting along three miles into our hike. I took two photos of the Star Wars book when we took a water break. They have both since made it to Instagram, the only reason they were taken at all.

I do not belong in nature, but nature heals me from the outside in. I am still sore from miles of walking, climbing, breathing. I haven’t felt this good, physically, all year. And though I thought the forest itself would open my mind and allow me to sort through the thoughts and worries stockpiled there after working nonstop to afford some kind of lifestyle, I found I could dwell on only one string of thought the whole duration of each hike: I am on a hike, I am with my two favorite living things, the air does not hurt me. I am free.

Only now, back in my home office once again struggling to work enough to make enough to survive, are deeper thoughts surfacing.

A Star Wars book doesn’t belong in nature, either, but somehow it fits there, its bright colors bold and brilliant against the natural greens of the forest. There are no filters on the photos I capture of it, because filters are for pretending things are better, and in the middle of nowhere surrounded by trees and the loves of your life, better is now, achievement unlocked, there is no topping these colors.

Books are stories that come from people who are born and live lives and transform that living into words. Perhaps a Star Wars book is as natural as the dirt beneath it, if you look past the solid cover and printed pages and gaze between the lines of its prose, squinting, just to catch a glimpse, if you’re lucky, of the time and place in which the words were formed.

Everyone reads to escape sometimes, but not everyone escapes to read—not everyone can. I would love to say that I packed that book and guided it along its first voyage into the wilderness so that I could sit under a tree and get lost in it. But I did not. We walked, I thought about how we were walking and how I wished we could do it just like that, every day, and except for the minute or so it took to capture those two photos, the book stayed wrapped in my backpack so that it would not withstand the elements.

If I could do it over again, I would carry the book under my arm as we hiked so that it, too, could know what it felt like to inhale real air. It would no longer smell like a new book, if I set it down its dust jacket would live up to its name, but it would look as if it had lived a whole life in a single weekend. It would feel like I felt—like everything I had endured the past few months happened so that I could walk in that forest and feel okay.

The book is back on its shelf and I am back at my desk, and the weight of my world has returned to me. It feels heavier than before. I did not enter that forest expecting to leave every ache and pain behind. I greeted it knowing that when I left, everything would feel harder and more pointless after experiencing days without sorrow or dread.

But that book, still on that shelf, will always remind me now of what we went through together. It heard it all—the long conversations between me and my husband about how we were on a hike, we were in love, the air did not hurt us. We were free. It heard the happy sounds of husky feet on earth, gentle whispers from the trees, our laughter, our wonder.

It remembers, as will I forever, that life can be good, even if only for a little while. You simply must, every now and then, run away from it. Not forever. Just for a weekend.

I do not belong in nature, but I should go there more often. I deserve to witness the power of doing nothing, being nothing, to understand that if I choose to carry something with me for miles on end, it’s not because I have to—it’s because I care about it. It is a part of me. Not the product of the thing, but the thing itself. That is the lifeline, the internal drive that keeps you going—knowing what matters to you most, what makes you feel whole, grabbing onto it and never letting it go.

If you bring it with you, it matters. It is enough.