Lost

Being lost used to cause you fearful and painful concern.  Some of the reason for this is simple enough; you were still young enough not to know where you were, much less who you were.

Being lost now has become one of your great joys, right up there with writing, reading, music,

You have been lost in a number of places.Some were geographical locations, others were more existential or metaphorical such as thought, ambition, antagonism, and ignorance.  This last place of being lost, ignorance, was all the more fearful, given the context that you not only did not believe you were lost; you believed you were right.

There is a good deal to say about being right, much of the conversation depending on your having taken risks and allowing yourself to be wrong.  There is a memorable state of being wrong that you hope never leaves you.  

How else will you recognize the implications of being right, which seems to you in a metaphorical way being like a flower?  Flowers are often beautiful or strange or delicate or vulnerable, possibly a combination of all these qualities.  They do not last long, only for the while necessary to convey to you their fragile-but-enduring sense of beauty.  Thus the connection between flowers and being right.  Being right is temporal.  

If you are right for too long, hold on to it beyond its use-by date, your vision will suffer.  You will see things in the ways of entitlement as opposed to sharing.  You share being right with the cosmos, with flowers, with small birds and animals.

Sometimes, when you are in a dozing state or off somewhere looking at ocean or mountains or rolling hills, you spot a place just at the horizon that reminds you of being neither lost nor oriented, somewhere just before being right.  

You understand this vision of being right is an abstraction, fragile and temporal as a flower.  You greet it with the warmth of seeing a lover, understanding how the state of not being right has brought you to the state where you can have a lover and flowers and visions to pursue.  You understand how these things are the tools of awareness.

You realize how such things as lovers and flowers and understanding are temporal.  This realization makes you treasure the state of being lost, being removed from the certainty of rightness.

You have also been lost in story, your own, and those of other writers you could not help but admire because of their significant ability to cause you to become lost

Life sometimes works that way. 

Some of the places wherein you were lost were enormous sprawls of cities.  In particular, you have been lost in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and London.  Because you were born and raised in Los Angeles, being lost there was the most fearful experience of all because you know most of the time the mountains are north.  You know where Pink's Hot Dog Stand is and the Angel's Flight, and the Hollywood Bowl.  You have no such landmarks in Mexico City or London.  Being lost in these cities is being closer to an absolute sense of lost-ness.  It was easy to be lost in these places, not so easy to be lost in Los Angeles.

By preference and the habit of years, you find it increasingly easier to become lost in story, which means you have a chance of reaching the same sense of being lost you experienced when you were lost in London and Mexico City.  When you are lost in story, there is no longer anyone who can help you, no one you can address for directions.  Then you discover that you can ask characters in much the same way you asked strangers in Mexico City and London.