The Impossibility of Loneliness: The Search for Home

Is it impossible to be lonely, or is loneliness an impossibly difficult thing? In the first part of this book, Chinle Miller wanders the desert and mountains with her dogs, exploring nature and an inner life of solitude, until an event happens that shakes her life to its core-her best-friend and cousin Janie is killed by a grizzly in Alaska. Grieving and becoming more and more fearful and obsessed with bears, Chinle heads north, stopping in the Yukon, then finally making her way to Alaska's Chugach Range, where her cousin was killed. There, after learning more about Janie's death, she begins a new journey, one that takes her to British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest for a life-saving encounter with a Kermode, or spirit bear, as well as meeting a First Nations native who reveals what she must know to find her true home. Half-journal and half story, this unique book will take you to the deserts of Utah, the high peaks of Colorado, the wilderness of the Yukon and Alaska, and into the depths of the Coastal Mountain rainforests of British Columbia. You'll find that, in a way, it's impossible to be alone, as we're always surrounded by life-and yet, as humans, we do get lonely, and it's an impossibly difficult thing, but a condition with a cure, for, as Chinle writes, "When you stand in the immensity of the natural world and realize how utterly insignificant you are, only then are you truly free."