A Field Guide to Getting Lost

by Rebecca Solnit

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.

Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration—how do you go about finding these things that

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away.

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way, though there

mapped. “I never was lost in the woods in my whole life,” said Daniel Boone, “though once I was confused for three days.” For Boone the distinction is a legitimate one, since he could eventually get himself back to where he knew where he was and knew what to do betweentimes.

Difference here is he knew how to get himself back -not lost but confused for 3 Days—-

mapped. “I never was lost in the woods in my whole life,” said Daniel Boone, “though once I was confused for three days.” For Boone the distinction is a legitimate one, since he could eventually get himself back to where he knew where he was and knew what to do betweentimes.

He knew hot to get get himself back where he should be and what to do in the meantime’s

sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.”

Key to all of it-optimism about surviving and finding their way...

Thoreau, for whom navigating life and wilderness and meaning are the same art, and who slips subtly from one to the other in the course of a sentence.

“Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

It is valuable, maybe even essential to be lost in the woods only then do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature-not until we are lost, until we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves

For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much

identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

Not matter of geography but urgent need to become anyone and no one

that love for the other that is also a desire to reside in your own mystery in the mystery of others.

found among the Pit River Indians. The Indians refer to it in English as ‘wandering.’ They say of a certain man, ‘He is wandering,

It would seem that under certain conditions of mental stress an individual finds life in his accustomed surroundings too hard to bear. Such a man starts to wander. He goes about the country, traveling aimlessly. He will stop here and there at the camps of friends or relations, moving on, never stopping at any place longer than a few days. He will not make any outward show of grief, sorrow or worry. . . . The Wanderer, man or woman, shuns camps and villages, remains in wild, lonely places, on the tops of mountains, in the bottoms of canyons.” This

Use this example of the win tu” he is wandering under certain conditions of mental stress an individual finds in life

It would seem that under certain conditions of mental stress an individual finds life in his accustomed surroundings too hard to bear. Such a man starts to wander. He goes about the country, traveling aimlessly. He will stop here and there at the camps of friends or relations, moving on, never stopping at any place longer than a few days. He will not make any outward show of grief, sorrow or worry. . . . The Wanderer, man or woman, shuns camps and villages, remains in wild, lonely places, on the tops of mountains, in the bottoms of canyons.” This

He goes about country wandering aimless stopping here and there w friends for a few days

wanderer isn’t so far from Woolf, and she too knew despair and the desire for what Buddhists call unbeing, the desire that finally led her to walk into a river with pockets full of rocks. It’s no...

De Angulo goes on to say that wandering can lead to death, to hopelessness, to madness, to various froms of despair, or that it may lead to encounters with other powers in the remoter places a wanderer may go. He concludes, “When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks. When this happens, the wandering is over, and the Indian becomes a shaman.” You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found, De Angulo’s editor notes, “All white men are wanderers, the old people say.”

It suggests too that to reside in comfort can be to have fallen by the wayside.

Finally she drew a group around a campfire as her picture of justice, saying that justice is helping each other on the journey. Another night,

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight

are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Important,,

can know the unknown, arrive in it, but how to go about looking for it, how to travel.

but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon,

This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the

The blue of longing -cherish it as a sensation on its own terms look across the distance without wanting to close it up-to attain it -Own your longing

you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?

She had lived with bedouins in the Negev desert, with royalty in Kashmir, with architects in Arizona. On the table in her bedroom were small glasses of soil, beautiful

The vast spaces of the American West, so little known to its immigrants even now, have always invited travelers to lose their past like so much luggage and reinvent themselves.

shul: the impression of something that used to be there.

for truth lies not only in incidents but in hopes and needs.