Dear Johanna,

This morning I marched off briskly towards the city center. I had several errands to do. On my way I came to remember the time in the beginning when I got here, when my steps were slow so that I could see everything. Now I knew exactly where to put my feet and exactly where I was heading. My steps were quick and decisive.

When I had done my last errand, I took a different route than I usually do, not to see something new, but because I thought it would take me quickly back to the apartment. But after a couple hundred meters, I discovered that I no longer recognized what I saw around me. Where was I really? Suddenly, I felt lost. Did I have a map with me? No, I didn't need a map anymore, I can find my way here in town. "I don't recognize that view." My steps became slower, more hesitant. But at that moment I realized that it actually didn't matter that I didn't know quite where I was. Plus; the weather was fantastic. The sun was shining and the wind had died down after yesterday's and the night's fierce blizzards. I lifted my head and began to look around, stopped to take pictures. My quick steps turned into the flaneur's stroll. I enjoyed to the fullest not knowing where I was, while I actually knew exactly where. For a long while I stood and watched a large flock of seabirds and was simultaneously viewed by them. By that time I had wandered myself back to a part of the town I recognized, but the contented feeling, and the slow pace lingered in me.

Later, when I told this to one of the other guest artists she exclaimed enviously that she had tried to get lost in recent weeks because it's so boring to recognize everything, everywhere, but that she had failed. A few years ago I read Rebecca Solnit's "A field guide to getting lost," a book worth reading, about getting lost, both spatially and mentally. About this of getting lost while maintaining control, she writes, among other things

”I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map…nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin’s terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or round a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home.”

Imagine how many worlds there are in one place.

I hope all is well with you and that you have the luck to get lost sometimes or just lose yourself in something.

Love,
Johanna