South of the Equator, East of the Past

I am driving down a dark, desolate street in the village of Penestanan just west of Ubud when I abruptly stop and look up at the sky. It is not the sky of my Ohio childhood full of fireflies and telescopes, nor the sky of my post-collage Wyoming summers nor of my Big Sur and Clearlake midnight escapades chasing meteor showers and miracles, but it is the sky here on an island 8 degrees south of the equator, somewhere east of everything that came before.

I first came to Bali two years ago and planted myself in the heart of Ubud whose intense energy un-grounded me and un-nerved me and forced me to surrender to it before I short circuited. And in surrendering, I found a stillness and peace that lead me to getting lost in the energy and finding the unexpected mystery and magic of not only Ubud, but in the raw and wild energy spread across the island.

Two years later I've eased my way back. I started on the west coast in Canggu then headed east toward Ubud, but not quite Ubud, just west of Ubud in the quite village of Penestanan where I can look up into a dark sky and see stars and forget where I am, where I can get lost wandering through rice fields or driving through the jungle, where I can lose track of time, lose track of place, lose track of everything that came before.

I have been on Bali for two weeks now, and I cannot stop thinking about Rebecca Solnit's book A Field Guide to Getting Lost. The book begins with Meno's question: How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? And like a meandering and haunting guided meditation, Solnit lures you into her ever shifting world of personal stories and historical landscapes, leading you to those unexpected things you find while lost in the unknown, terra incognita.

I first read the book in March 2012 during a thunderstorm on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. Then I re-read it on the flight back to San Francisco after having been stuck at JFK for over 24 hours. Somewhere in the sky over middle America moving at hundreds of miles per hour west, I intuitively knew that coming back to California was walking into certain unknown doom. I had left California living one life; I would return to live out a completely different one. Losing everything that came before is where I began to find those things whose nature was at one time totally unknown to me--those things of strength and forgiveness and grace and ultimately freedom and serenity.

Perhaps getting lost is the only place where we find those things we never knew could be found--those indescribable moments and scenes and feelings that cannot be captured by words or a picture. That point of transformation you never knew could be possible until you surrender to losing everything that came before.

What does getting lost mean to you? Like Solnit, do you see it as a point of transformation, finding those things totally unknown to you? Or something else entirely?