Uphill First: The Road to Anything That Matters
Malcom's Head: The Art of Getting Lost
Where genius loci meets the spirit of discovery.
Malcom's Head is where the spirit of place reveals itself: a great place to get lost, and maybe find what you did not know you were looking for.
Genius Loci
The word "genius" in the modern sense, after all, originates in the Latin phrase genius loci: the spirit of a place. So Fair Isle is, or has, a genius. It is a great place to get lost. Huh?
The Journey to Malcom's Head
The Art of Getting Lost
The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.
Not to live.
Destruction.
The Door into the Dark
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That is where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Our attempts to master it often leave us fumbling, frustrated, discombobulated. And yet therein lies our greatest capacity for growth and self-transcendence.
Los: The Disbanding of an Army
The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army. This origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world.
Living the Questions
Basically, embracing uncertainty and doubt: be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
Live always at the edge of mystery, the boundary of the unknown. But they transform the unknown into the known, hauling it in like fishermen.
Get you out into that dark sea.
Calculating the Unforeseen
How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance.