A Field Guide to Getting Lost

the end of the world could be a place as well as a time.

It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.

themselves, Hmmmm, how do I engage this process in a way that I don’t become too frightened by what it might unfold or too complacent by avoiding it? This is the delicate work of awareness.

So in the practice of awareness, which has gone on for centuries after centuries and millennium after millennium, human beings have asked

Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it natural. There are more sunrises coming, but even dreams could be emptied out.

we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.

For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.

When someone doesn’t show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t—and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.

To acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge, and the unknown is visible as terra incognita but invisible as selection—the map showing agricultural lands and principal cities does not show earthquake faults and aquifers, and vice versa.

and Klein himself, who managed to reconcile being an avant-gardist and a medieval mystic, made four pilgrimages to the saint’s shrine in Italy as an adult. Or at least as a fully grown man, for he seems never to have stopped being a child in some ways, spoiled, petulant, impatient with restrictions,