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When the temple bell chimed, I got up and walked slowly to a metal chair in the front of the room. My talk was called "the Zen of Running," but to talk about running, I would have to talk about the river that broke me and the mountains that healed me.

I would have to talk about endings and beginnings, and how when you're in the middle, it's almost impossible to tell the two apart. Falling from the boat felt like a hard stop, a boulder rolled into the middle of a long tunnel, impassable. It was only after I healed that I saw my injury for what it was—a beginning wrapped around countless other beginnings. It was the start of something deeper, a spiritual practice, my own kind of wild Zen, an experiment in how to live and how to wake up to the brief flashings. They were so beautiful they took your breath away, and they were so easy to miss! I didn't want to miss them anymore.

Lifting my gaze, I looked at the faces before me. Their expressions were expectant but open, their bodies still but alert. They had come to receive something. All I had to do was offer it. Yet I couldn't tell them how to live, I could only tell them how I lived. I remembered something a person had once said to me. "You could share all your secrets and still not give everything away." I did not know him well, and would not know him for long, but I understood what he meant. We each have our own true way. We can imitate or be inspired, but we can only really ever be ourselves.

This is not a story about skydiving. Or capoeira. Of course you know that by now. It's not even really about running or Zen—nor marriage nor motherhood. And it's a book about all those things. I can't give you the six simple steps to enlightenment or the top ten tips to running faster. But I gladly offer you my secrets—and these brief flashings in the phenomenal world that crack open the sky and make us blink with wonder. The answers, if there are any, are yours to discover.

PART ONE

RIVERS

1. LESSONS IN FALLING

The first rule of rivers is the first rule of Zen. Don't fight the current. Go with it, not against it.

I know this. In the decades I've spent on rivers, I've learned this, sometimes the hard way. Often the hard way. And yet here I am, at the edge of a wild river in the remotest part of Idaho, at war with the water.

It's June 23, 2016, and my husband, Steve, and I are at the start of a six-day whitewater rafting trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon, through a canyon so rugged it's called the River of No Return. The Middle Fork is one of the most premier wilderness trips in the country, famed for its clear free-flowing river, trout rich waters, natural hot springs, thrilling whitewater—one hundred major rapids in one hundred miles—and a remoteness that's unrivaled in the Lower Forty-Eight. The only way in or out is by boat, foot, horseback, or—in case of emergency—bush plane. Rafting access is strictly regulated to protect the wilderness. Getting a permit to float the Middle Fork without a guide, as our friends did, isn't like winning the lottery. It is winning the lottery.

The river is so loud we can hear it before we see it, a thunderous rush raging out of the high country. It's almost more frightening this way, like a cartoon waterfall lurking just around the next bend while you sail forth in a flimsy canoe, screaming "back paddle!" futilely over the din, only you can't because you've driven across four states in a day and crashed in a sleeping bag in your friend's backyard, and now you are here at the River of No Return, pretending to be brave.

I dip my toes in the frigid water and try to take a deep breath. Steve and I have given this trip to each other as an early tenth wedding anniversary present. We've been running rivers together even longer than we've been married, but this is by far the most technical whitewater we've ever rafted without a guide. I watch the rapids roiling over themselves, worry rising like a lump in my throat.

Then I remind myself that I'm with Steve, and that we do these things because we love them and because being afraid is rarely a good enough reason not to go. Fear belongs in a category of emotions we try not to talk about. If our marriage has an unofficial mission statement, this is it.

Rafts rigged, our group gathers on the beach to launch; then it's one-two-three, and we're pushing off, up to our ankles in the fifty-degree water, shoving ourselves out of the eddy. The current catches our inflatable raft with swift assurance, tugging us into the river's flow.

The Middle Fork of the Salmon is a pool-and-drop river, characterized by deep, calm water above each foaming rapid and another pool below it, the sequence repeating itself all the way downstream. Steve told me this at least a hundred times over the past few months, attempting to comfort me with the fact that if things go sideways in a hairball cataract, at least we'll have mellow water in which to collect ourselves and our gear. But this was not reassuring to me, not in the least. I knew what it really meant-—that the rapids are huge and horrifying and can wreck you for real.