Erin

“The King's shadow doesn't disappear altogether. I've learned that we all live with it, each in our own way.

Some people live huddled under the King's wings. I decided to confront him. Sometimes I'm amazed. The attacks scare me, they wound me, but they bring with them the memory of the things I've lived, the things I've learned.

My wound is also my cure.”
― Guilherme Petreca, Ye

“This suggests that most European-Americans remained lost over the centuries, lost not in practical terms but in the more profound sense of apprehending where they truly were, of caring what the history of the place was and its nature. Instead, they named it after the places they had left and tried to reconstruct those places through imported plants, animals, and practices, though pumpkin, maple, and other staples would enter their diet as words like Connecticut and Dakota and raccoon would enter their vocabularies.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few named, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don't know what tongues the people who erected that standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don't know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don't know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don't know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don't exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren't quite themselves and open onto the impossible.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost