A desire path is a trail worn down to dirt that forms when enough footsteps deviate from the official route: a deer path diverges from a hiking trail; rainwater creates rivulets in a hillside; walkers cut diagonals across grassy squares.

Often, desire paths are born from the collective urge to get where we're going, faster. But sometimes they emerge from other desires: to follow the river's edge, to seek out the shade, or to tell a specific story. They are small acts of free will – even civil disobedience – that say, “I want to go this way.”

With desire paths in mind, we asked how you are leaving your mark on this landscape. You answered with stories of carving out paths and taking up space in unexpected places: a guerilla garden in a sidewalk strip, a drag open stage in a salty old Boston bar, back-country hiking through the center of the city, a meditation labyrinth in a Brookline parking lot, a fridge full of free food in Allston, a protestor squatting in a soon-to-be-felled tree in Lincoln.

When we asked for your desires, you said: I want to throw a rock – hard – against the frozen Charles River and crack the ice, to paint the city in brighter colors, to identify that anonymous mustached stranger hanging around the Emerson campus, to time-travel back to high school in Lexington before social media. You spoke to us in forms we’ve never seen (weavings made on Strava; a map made of flavors) and from perspectives we have never held (the POV of “what a bird wants”; the idea of a “thrutopia”).

Through all of this, we have pieced together a little bit of hope: that the world is not as it seems, that nothing is set in stone, and that you have the power to create what you want to see here. In Rebecca Solnit's words, “Hope is an axe you break down doors with." As the days begin to shorten and we enter a season that often feels scarce, let these passages sharpen your axe and cut your way through the dark. There are lesser-known passageways hiding in plain sight.