Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Good! Quite a moving and intimate recollection

This might be my favorite book.

The Blue of Distance and Daisy Chains were so beautiful. I think this may be my favorite Solnit book so far.

Loving it so far. I’m on page 30 but captivated by something I saw when I opened it up to a random page. It’s about a rotting caterpillar and “...the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.” Want to get to that page and to jump around rather than going in order.

Not impressed with the book. I'm going to stop reading.

I don't know why I like this writing so much.

The Wintu language, and holy cow she should read Wisdom sits in places

Interesting essays on life. Not a quick read, but very thought provoking.

Mostly just lost. Heh

This is a lovely book to be devoted slowly, so I’m taking it one chapter at a time and letting myself sit with that for a few days before continuing.

I am absolutely in love with it so far. Solnit gives me nostalgia for things I never expereinced.

The blue of distance

The mind too can be imagined as a landscape... (But most of us) ... Have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot. (...) it's a landscape where getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.

I relate a good deal to “Abandon”. I love her writing throughout.

"It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged. . . . It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose."

"For a while it was forever, and then things started to fall apart." Oh, big mood.
The way she describes building a relationship? Painfully accurate. I'm currently 5 months out from a breakup and while another relationship seems desirable, it also seekms impossible. "But you lit the fire that burned it down yourself." WOW. Painfully accurate.

Well, especially as someone who is now Narcan trained & carries the nasal spray in her purse at all times, that is truly maddening.

"But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss." You right.
But I'll take my risks small for now. There's something to be said for a bit of control and stability after turmoil.

I think a part of the reason I'm struggling to read this book is that I'm self aware enough to know I am afraid of getting lost.
But I'm okay with that.
I can see that getting lost is valuable.
But that doesn't make me or my caution invalid.

But here is a quote that is a Big Mood.
"...teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you." This sentence is my experience, wow. I'm doing ok at this Doing Adulthood thing, but that's definitely how it feels right there.

Alright, I'm now skipping & skimming through this book bc I...don't really like it. It's not like it's terrible or anything, it just doesn't interest me enough. It's not for me, is all. Parts of it are okay though. Like, I've mostly read this part about Marine.

"the terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew they did not know, and awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it's awareness of knowledge's limits."

"In essays, ideas are the protagonists, and they often develop much like characters down to the surprise denouement."

Bük club reedz

I love this book and will look to collect it!

"Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you're present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion."

On blue:
I appreciated the "blue is the colour of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world". Especially blue skies on a sunny day ring of space and freedom for me.
Which is proof that I can hold two different truths at the same time, every since I listened to the radiolab podcast episode on why the sky isn't blue... I constantly am aware of the difficulties with colour naming convetions

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 are in someways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” ... The question ... struck me as the basic tactical question in life.

When do you cease to be lost? When you recognise your surroundings again, or when your surroundings have become familiar to you?