Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Finally starting this and umm I love it so much already??? This takes me to another headspace entirely, like reading Virginia Woolf or Marilynne Robinson.

This is definitely a "pencil in your hand" kind of a book but it feels deeply rewarding so far.

Eh. Sticking with it because it’s a quick and easy read but it’s not the soul-searching book I was hoping for so far

Beautiful passages ... a book of essays worth finding (excuse the pun)

amazing😁

... the Shangri-las and the terra incognitas,...

... just as sex for woman has the twin possibilities of procreation and annihilation.

Gravity is about motion, weight, resistance, force, the most primary experience after all the touches on our skin, of being corporeal.

Exceptional beauty and charm are among those gifts given by the sinister fairy at the christening.

The blue of distance comes with time..

...blue...the light that gets lost...the color of solitude and of desire...of there seen from here, of where you’re not...if where you can never go...

Wintu... the cardinal directions.

To calculate on the unforeseen..

I was in love with her writing by the end of the 2nd paragraph.

"The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil."

How did I not know about Rebecca Solnit sooner.

“There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.”

“‘How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?’ ... Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration— how will you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?” ok ok ok

“...the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.”

“...the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence is metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.”

A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't.

...I tried to cut away a small cluster of the pale brown roses to take with me, they immediately became less beautiful. Some things we have only as they remain lost, some things are not lost only as long as they are distant.

...I tried to cut away a small cluster of the pale brown roses to take with me, they immediately, they immediately became less beautiful. Some things we have only as they remain lost, some things are not lost only as long as they are distant.

Lake Titicaca, one of those high-altitude lakes, [...] like blue eyes staring back at the blue sky.

Lake Tiiticaca, one of those high-altitude lakes, [...] like blue eyes staring back at the blue sky.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.

"Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.”

“The weight of a dream is not in proportion to its size. Some dreams are made of fog, some of lace, some of lead. Some dreams seem to be made out of less the usual debris of the psyche than bolts of lightning sent from outside.”

“In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible.”

“A story can be a gift like Ariadne’s thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth’s ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.”