The Maasai posture toward "ultimate truths," then, may be less a sign of childish ignorance than of an elder's faith. In this light, epistemic humility is not a limitation but a source of strength—a means of resisting domination, deferring possession, and sustaining a more integrated relationship with the land, the self, and the divine.

The wilderness summons us into a knot of paradox. First, we must confront the desires that compelled us to depart in the first place. Second, we discover what is on the other side of our own disappearance. Finally, we find that the wilderness will always send us back, transformed. In joining perhaps the most ancient tradition of humankind, we take up the path of pilgrims of renewal.

It was a meeting years in the making. Down a slope from the eastern escarpment of the Great Rift Valley, a group of Kikuyu men gathered just inside the gate of Laikipia Nature Conservancy, a private conservation area that rolled north across rippling ridges and valleys towards the northern rangelands of Kenya. The boldest of these farmers reclined under an African olive tree or sat on polished thin benches or plastic jerrycans, while the more skeptical leaned warily against t

The missionary, therefore, has a strange opportunity to be truly found because they are perhaps the most truly lost.