"For some, getting lost is not a matterof geography so much as identity.
A passionate desire, an urgent need, to become no one and anyone,
to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are and who others think you are.
Through the acute perception of the nuances of consciousness,
the dissolution of identity can not onlybefound in foreign places and remote fastnesses,
but also in a stroll down the street,
a moment's solitude in an armchair,
a drive across town,
or sitting quietly at the lakefront."
~R.Solnit
"Not til we are completely lost, or turned around (for a man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost), do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.
Not til we are lost in other worlds,
not til we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves
and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world
and loses his soul?"
~Thoreau
"Not to find one'sway in a city may well be uninteresting and banal.
It requires ignorance, nothing more...
but to lose one's self in a city - as one loses one's self in a forest -
that calls for quite a different schooling.
To lose yourself is a voluptuous surrender;
lost in your arms, lost to the world,
utterly immersed in what is present so that it's 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...
One does not get lost, but loses one's self
with the implication that it is a conscious choice,
a chosen surrender,
a psychic state achievable thru more than physical geography.
That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you
is usually what you need to find,
and finding it...finding it is simply a matter of getting...lost."
~Unknown
