a field guide to getting lost by rebecca solnit

It arrives in many forms and Solnit holds our hand through each one. If blue is the color of lost, the form of lost is shape-shifting.

Therefore make the first building of its own color the next make less outlined and more blue.' Learn more. Leonardo wrote 'to make one appear more distant than another, you should represent the air as rather dense. 'Ginevra de' Benci' by Leonardo da Vinci painted when the artist was in his early 20s. If lost were an image, it might be that blue horizon. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving in to the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest place. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Light at the blue end of the spectrum that does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. In her landmark work on embracing chaos and pain as a means to peace, Pema Chödrön argues that in cultivating moment-to-moment curiosity - such as looking to a far horizon and wondering - we just might find our deepest kind of peace. Or maybe, as Rebecca Solnit (born in 1961) suggests in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the distant, far horizon represents that which is lost, unknown, and thus, it captivates our interest. It is imagery we often use because it is mutually understood. Is it the sky's orientation? The foresight of things to come and far sight of things that have been? American poet Mary Oliver, a disciple of Emerson and self-professed sister of Walt Whitman, once wrote that she longed for a 'heaven-verging horizon.' In other words, that long, far horizon. 'We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.' There is something about a horizon that provides alignment.

'The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon,' surmised Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A field guide to getting lost by rebecca solnit