Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

there is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness... is it because joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn't fail, mortality enters in;... is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that describes in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?

beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story. desire for them is a desire for a noble destiny, and beauty can seem like a door to meaning as well as to pleasure. and yet such people are often nothing extraordinary except in their effect on others

that because a choice had been made other choices could be made

'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... no, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay'... we have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. nor the violence of the metamorphosis

...but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every day life. sometimes an old paragraph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists

if 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... for something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond

'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 extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?