Way Around

By: Nicholas Triolo

Published by Milkweed Editions, 2025

<p><b>"<i>The Way Around</i> is the kind of book my soul perpetually yearns for. It reshaped how I see the world."--Robert Moor, author of <i>On Trails: An Exploration</i></b></p><p>Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. "Do the reps," he internalized. "Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams." Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent.</p><p>While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object--a kind of "ritualized remembering" birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet's Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother's diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country.</p><p>At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home--for the flourishing of all.</p><br>