Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves.” - Tsongkhapa, Tibetan philosopher

“I realise now that it was my own desire to step out of the train, the car, the conversation, the obligation, into the landscape that I have this imagined ancestor. ... Perhaps these space are the best corollary I have found to truth, to clarity, to independence. ... I was trying to send this missing ancestor... to a path through an uninhibited expanse where heaven seems to come all the way down to your feet.”

“Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.”

“If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it... an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.”

“But in this world we actually live in, distance ceases to be blue when we arrive in it. The far becomes the near, and they are not the same place.”

“Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.” - Simone Weil

“We treat desire as a problem to be solved... rather than [focus] on the nature and sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes... if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?”

“Longing, because desire is full of endless distances.” - Robert Hass

“Some questions are more significant than their answers... For it is not, after all, really a question about whether you can know the unknown, arrive in it, but how to go about looking for it, how to travel.”

“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.”

“Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.”

“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... to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself... it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.”

“How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognising the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognising that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life requires most of us.”

“‘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 are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”

“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.”

I made a mistake. yike.

"a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is ...

"The blues [the music genre] are a kind of captivity narrative, but the white captivity narratives often told of people whose capture was either temporary or became full acceptance into a new society. ...

"Lose the whole world, [...] get lost in it, and find your soul."

Stories that make the familiar strange again, like those that revealed the lost landscapes, lost cemeteries, lost species around my home. Conversations that make everything around them disappear. Dreams that I forget until I realize they've colored everything I felt and did that day. Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way, though there are other ways of being lost.

"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. The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know."

Who knew so much could be written about blue? I love the way she melds personal histories with philosophical contemplation.

Who knew so much could be written about blue? I love the way she melds personal histories with philosophical contemplations.

The young live absolutely in the present, but a present of drama and recklessness, of acting on urges and running with the pack. They bring the fearlessness of children to acts with adult consequences, and when something goes wrong they experience the shame or the pain as an eternal present too.

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.

The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.

"Every love has its landscape."

my first Solnit, bought today on a whim , and I've already underlined heck out of it so far 🙊

Like literally I've been reading this the whole day(well I had breaks between) But i would stop and think for like 10-15 minutes on a page and then take notes. It's not even funny like, mind-blowing. It's not the best book ever written, but having learnt a few things about lost and travel in these past few weeks, it really gets me thinking. (wow i'm at the character count)