A word sometimes expresses a deep inner calling and dares to reach further than the dictionary definition would ever allow. John Muir’s saunter compels us to go deep and reclaim our awareness that we exist within nature, not simply traversing across it.

My own word, stravage, was gifted to me by a wounded, sometimes deceiving, yet wise and endearing individual. Then, as now, this new word invited me out of my rigid box of convention and revealed that I truly needed more defiant adventure in my life.

The man who gave it to me intuitively knew something that I did not yet know about myself: I must stray beyond old habits and stravage into territories that I was trained to see as too disruptive, too irresponsible, too risky. Perhaps it’s like a relationship that strays beyond the normal limits for the sake of adventure, health, and love. Or, maybe it’s like straying into the heretical. Sometimes, the greatest philosophical and spiritual insights come from such forays into the forbidden.

The word stravage, no longer laden with the rage of an oppressed and defiant Scottish people, still represents a powerful compulsion to follow one’s own path with a sense of passion, risk and love.

- Royce Fitts, Author of The Geography of the Soul