Wilderness

 I don't want to make it to the promised land if it means I forget the wilderness.

― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

There is a certain seduction to the idea of the "promised land" - a place of abundance, peace, and rest.

We're told to strive for it. Dream about it. Push through suffering for the sake of one day reaching it. 

But what happens when the very path that led us to this dreamland becomes something we are expected 

to erase or sanitize? 

Cole Arthur Riley's words cut against that grain. They speak to a sacred refusal- I will not forget the 

wilderness. Because forgetting it would mean forgetting who we became there.

To remember the wilderness is to remember pain, yes- but also survival. To remember the small joys 

that glowed in dark corners. The people who stayed. The courage that surprised us. The strength we 

didn't know we had.

If the promised land asks us to forget the scars, the hunger, the uneven prayers- then it is not promise, 

but amnesia.

To remember is to resist the story that says we only matter once we are whole. To remember is to say: 

Even in the wilderness, I was worthy.

Let us walk forward- but let us never forget the ground we once bled on. Because in remembering, we 

reclaim every piece of who we are.