blissful hiker ❤︎ inspiring you to hike your own hike
Long-distance backpacker Alison "Blissful Hiker" Young has walked over 13,000 miles on six continents including New Zealand's Te Araroa, Europe's Pyrenean Haute Route, Africa's Drakensberg Traverse and the Pacific Crest Trail in the United States.
In a series of personal essays coupled with found sound, this podcast explores her journey of self-discovery as a middle-aged titanium-reinforced cancer thriver, sharing the sometimes unglamorous but vital truth about empowerment, inspiring others to blaze their own trails in this journey we call life.
blissful hiker ❤︎ inspiring you to hike your own hike
Inhabiting the Vulnerable Space
As Blissful heals from a bilateral mastectomy due to breast cancer, she reflects on the person she wants to be going forward.
- Blissful is incredibly lucky in only having to undergo a radical surgery to rid her body of cancer.
- Step by step walking through her neighborhood, she slowly recovers back to her hiker self.
- The American writer Joyce Carol Oates speaks of the moment we realize that loss is part of our experience. “When that starts to happen to you, it is quite stunning.”
- Being out of control with illness is falling-to-the-knees humbling for Blissful and it's a challenge to stay positive and "bad ass."
- But she's inspired by the late actor Julian Sands who spoke of climbing summits as "not so much a celebration of oneself, but the eradication of one’s self-consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony, hopefully with your environment.”
- What a way to live!
MUSIC: Poema del Pastor Coya by Angel Lasala as played by Alison Young, flute and Vicki Seldon, piano.
