“Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.”
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Header Image: The receding tide on Lindisfarne, Holy Island. In the background is the castle.
Leave the door open for the unknown, that’s where the important things come from… for, to acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Header Image: This is some of the local Blackthorn blossom. It explodes into this wonderful white for a few days and then is gone. It’s leaving is often hastened by a spring storm, but not this year, so it has been glorious.
Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been ploughed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. Environmentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don’t produce a crop. The same is true of the meadowlands of imagination, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space – for wilderness and for public space – must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.
Rebecca Solnit
Wanderlust
Graham Chastney 