Entering the wilderness means stepping off the well-worn path and into

unfamiliar territory. Author Alice Walker’s insights about inner change are

well worth putting in our backpack: “Some periods of our growth are so

confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may

feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It

would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who

explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually

becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before.”