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"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 / Field guide to Getting Lost
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"Not to find one’s way in the city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in the city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling."

— Walter Benjamin
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"The extreme and growing transience of persons, places, and things makes even more difficult the task of discovering who and what we are. Yet this discovery remains the most important thing we have to accomplish. For it is mainly by his association with things, persons, and events of this world that the inner person is awakened. All else comes from this. And there are no easy terms for it. We must take thought now, in the truest and deepest sense; and to take thought means that we must, for a while, stop doing. A deliberate slowness is needed, a staying or a standing aside, a waiting, to arrive at where we really ought to be. From that known place, that felt place, it may be possible to go on, to do and become many things. Separated from it, we will be lost to the present and future, and our poems, if they come at all, will be brief reports of disaster."

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"To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things. We become involved in its life, the heavy sound of it in the summer as it wears away silt and gravel from its cutbanks, pushing them into sandbars that will be islands in another far off year. Trees are forever tilting over the water, to fall and be washed away, to lodge in a drifting pile somewhere downstream. The heavy gray water drags at the roots of willows, spruce, and cottonwoods; sometimes it brings up the trunk of a tree buried in sand a thousand years before, or farther back than that, in the age of ice. The log comes loose from the fine sand, heavy and dripping, still bearing the tunnel marks made by the long dead insects. Salmon come in midsummer, then whitefish, and salmon again in the fall; they are caught in our nets and carried away to be smoked and eaten, to be dried for winter feed. Summer wears away into fall; the sound of the river changes. The water clears and slowly drops; pan ice forms in the eddies. One morning in early winter we wake to a great and sudden silence: the river is frozen."

— Living Off the Country / John Haines
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"

Let the inhuman, drab machines
patrol the road that leads nowhere,
and the men with Bibles
and speeches come to the door,
asking directions —
we will turn them all away
and be alone.

We will not storm what barricades
they erect on the Cuban beaches,
or set forth on the muddy
imperial water —
at least we shall go to hell
with open faces.

"

— The End of Summer (part I) / John Haines, News From the Glacier
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"

The immense sadness
of approaching winter
hands in the air
this cloudy September.

Today a muddy road
filled with leaves, tomorrow
the stiffening earth and
a footprint
glazed with ice.

The sun breaking through
still warm, but the road
deep in shadow;
your hand in mine is cold.

Our berries picked,
the mushrooms gathered,
each of us hides
in his heart a small piece
of this summer,
as mice store their roots
in a place
known only to them.

We believe in the life to come,
when the stark tree
stands in silence above
the blackened leaf;
but now at a bend in the road
to stop and listen:

Strange song
of a southbound bird
overflows in the quiet dusk
from the top of that tree.

"

— Poem / John Haines, News From the Glacier
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