I have been reading a book titled, "A Field Guide to Getting Lost". I picked it up at the library about a week ago with a couple of others...not expecting to find myself reading a few sentences and then staring off out the window pondering the meaning. It's rare to find a book that is so engaging...a book that asks those very simple questions and you can feel the deep gaze into your eyes from the black & white text...as if, perhaps, me--the reader might have the answer. That is the kind of book it is--a statement of the obvious, of answers to questions we do not have yet cling to their presence in our life and build myths to feed our urgent need to know. I am enjoying it. Revisiting the mighty men who spoke a millennium ago and more recently just a century or so in the past. The voices that linger, the words that tap you on the shoulder...only to find yourself facing a different direction as if the pivot of one's head would change the path those impulses will travel along the synaptic pathways. As if this alone would trigger the change in awareness...in how one lives.
It is time to head home...and here are some of the passages that will occupy the attention of my brain on the way to the 'burbs:
"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....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. 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 evolving into the someone you want to be?"
quotes along the way...
1.) "live always a the 'edge of mystery'--the boundary of the unknown."
2.) "All experiences, in matters of philosophical discovery, teaches us that, in such discovery, it is the unforeseen which we must calculate most largely."
3.) "Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for quite a different schooling."
culminates in a glimpse at understanding...
"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."