I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of

the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time, taking time to be more fully present.

Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right

now.

When Show Strait began her 1100 mile trek from the Mojave Desert in California all the

way to the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, she had no, did you hear me, no, experience as

a long distant hiker. She'd never even gone backpacking before. She just knew that she

had lost everything and she believed this hike could somehow help her find her way out.

I had been at this place in my life when I was out of sorts and what I think of as at

the bottom of my life. Her downward spiral had begun four years earlier when she was 22.

I was a senior in college when my mother thought what she got was a bad cold. She went to

the doctor and we found out that she had advanced stage lung cancer and she died seven weeks

later. I was becoming the woman I was going to become. And in the midst of this I lost

my one root, my role model, my mother.

Cheryl's biological father had left the family long ago when Cheryl was six. Her stepfather

Ed helped raise her. But after her mother died, Ed moved on, remarried and started a new

family.

And so when I lost my mom, I really truly became an orphan.

Cheryl had married young at only 19 years old to a 21 year old named Paul in a small ceremony

on her family's land.

I loved my husband, he loved me, but I was just too young in a too much grief to sustain

that kind of bond.

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