Hi, I'm Anna Marie Cox and welcome to With Friends Like These Converts edition.

Some of us are given the gift of knowing exactly when our life changes.

For Julie Raymeyer, that moment came deep in the desert.

There were really no humans in my awareness beyond a few cards about 10 miles away at the bottom of the valley.

And that sense of trust being surrounded by this enormous space and the kind of quiet of that space.

Even when there was sound from the wind, there was a sense of the pace of change was geological, not human.

The story of how she came to that realization of her place in geological time is a conversion story of the most profound sort.

Not just a switch from one opinion to another, but from one conception of self to another.

And of course, to understand the enormity of Julie's metamorphosis, we need to understand where she began.

So let's see, in the book four time, while I was in still am a science writer.

And my background is in mathematics.

I went to graduate school at MIT in math.

And I did lots of stuff.

I built my own house, my own strawberry house.

I was a professor of math and the classics at St. John's College, which I loved.

And I ran a marathon.

I was on a search and rescue team.

I have always been very connected to nature.

My house that I built is outside Santa Fe in a little valley with a stream running through it.

And it's surrounded by national forest.

So I could literally walk out my door and go for a hike of pretty much any length I wanted to.

I could have hiked Colorado from my front door.

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