http://www.jinjoohwang.com/6

"'Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance- nothing more,' says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. 'But to lose oneself in a city- as one loses oneself in a forest- that calls for quite a different schooling.' 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. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography."
Rebecca Solnit: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

"It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."
Henry David Thoreau: Walden

It's crazy how disasters like the crash of Air France flight 447 still occur. Reading about it feels strange, as if it really couldn't and shouldn't have happened, even though it did in that small possibility that it could. And when I keep thinking about airplanes and crashes and then the sky and the sea, it makes me feel so weary because I think that that kind of fate, of being both peaceful and destructive, is a really pretty sort of tragedy.


Snapped a photo on my flight back to California (during spring break, when my flight arrived at 5 in the morning) This is my dream world! Endless clouds upon clouds under the entire open and empty sky

Anyway, my home here is so still. Nothing really has changed at all, and I guess I actually depend on and find comfort in that.

This is an old post from crushes

g,
I realized the other day, that when I’m around you is the only time I really smile. And I don’t just smile. I have this closet full of smiles that I’d never had good reason to use before. When I’m around other people, I smile when I know I should be smiling. But with you, I smile because I couldn’t do anything else, even if I wanted to.
— s

that is not, but could be, mine