“The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.” – Rebecca Solnit
This friendship. This group of four.
More than most of my friendships, this one has been defined by getting lost.
The past few months were crowded with stress from life, work, politics, and the big medical school decision.
Leaving our community is no small thing and I found myself asking, “Do I even want to go to medical school anymore if it means leaving ‘home’ yet again?” (Yes, the answer is yes).
Through it all, I think, at various times we lost ourselves and each other.
But we made it through. We found a way. Changed. Better. More whole.
We actually physically got lost, too, in a redwood grove at twilight. We wandered hand in hand among trees almost as old as Jesus. The light changed the landscape, as it is wont to do, bathing everything in saffron before casting a purplish-greenish hue. We exchanged wisdom, love, and energy in whispers, not wanting to disrupt the resonance of the ancient beings.
Every redwood grove I have visited has felt sacred. But I have never gotten lost among redwoods before. It felt good. For those few minutes when we had no idea which way to go, I felt comfortable, relieved, and in a sense, honored by the trees.
I felt it was an honor just to be.
——
Redwoods depend on their community to survive. Their roots are surprisingly shallow, but they spread far and connect and intertwine with others. They care for each other, sharing nutrients, light, and warnings.
If two trees are growing next to each other and one isn’t getting enough light, the other tree can choose to actually grow in such a way as to allow enough light to reach the other.
Sometimes you can tell where a tree used to be by the shape of the one still standing.
——
I am going to include a few quotes from Rebecca Solnit among these photos because we all really like her and she’s helped us feel more comfortable with the unknown. =)
“There isn’t a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house.
You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers.”
– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” (Plato)
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 becoming someone else?”
– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.
The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts.”
– Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
“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.
That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.”
– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors?
The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest.
On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old.
To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what.
[…]
A tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.”
– Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees
* Photos by all four of us.
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