'a field guide to getting lost'

"“Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves,” said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word “track” in Tibetan: shul, “a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks, and scars left by the turbulence of selfish craving.” In Yiddish, shul means a synagogue, but I was trying to send this missing ancestor not to temple but to a path through an uninhabited expanse where heaven seems to come all the way down to your feet." (rebecca solnit, “a field guide to getting lost,” 50-51)

Emil Ludwig, The Nile

The light has broken the silence. A few geese cackle, flying up from a dune to the east above the lake-head, but the white egrets sit motionless in the ambatch. Yonder a solitary grey heron, who has spent the night standing on one leg, makes the first move, draws in his long neck, stretches out his pointed beak, spreads his wings, and flies away low over the water. Soon there is movement everywhere. Sideways-twisted horns sway slowly on a few black heads, suspicious eyes peer into the new light, while a few tufts of hair twitch behind them-- it is a buffalo family, velvety dark, broad-browed, and threatening. (50)

james salter

We dash the black river, its flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back. (light years, not as good as having someone read it aloud to you..........)