No Direction Home
collage, 8.5 x 5 inches
It is good to feel lost... because it proves you have a navigational sense of where "Home" is. You know that a place that feels like being found exists. And maybe your current location isn't that place but, Hallelujah, that unsettled, uneasy feeling of lost-ness just brought you closer to it. ~Erika Harris
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. ~Henry David Thoreau
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself. ~Alan Alda
"We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the 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 whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? 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. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away."
ReplyDeletepage 30-31 The Blue of Distance in A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
Mo, what a profoundly beautiful and moving passage. Thank you for sharing it.
Deletebeautiful little gem! And of course we're all going to have a favourite poem or words to say on this wonderful thought of finding home, feeling lost. Here's one I love: Nature as restorative, as a help for finding our ground, for recharging and re-energizing, because we can be anywhere if we are at home in ourselves. (says she, the supreme home body :)
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Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree of a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest know
Where you are. You must let it find you.
-David Wagoner
Thank you, Carole, for your kind words and for sharing your thoughts, especially that gorgeous poem.
DeleteLove the colors in this collage -- my favorite 'words' for finding home come from the Wizard of Oz when the good witch tells Dorothy she always had the power to get home - but that she had discover it for herself.
ReplyDeleteYes, there's no place like home, and it does have to be discovered on our own. Thank you, Judy.
Deletegreat post, Sharmon, much food for thought, accompanied by your pensive collage... hmmm x
ReplyDeleteSo happy you enjoyed it, Cat! xox
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