I love these. I’m going to use them on my phone. Better yet, I should jump start my stagnating creativity and make my own.

This one by Jason Dean is lovely… I don’t quite have the guts to do this though… my iPhone map is always there to save me. I should get over it. “Your map is in your mouth!” as my dad always says. (i.e. just ask for help!)

Which brings me to… Stop Asking For Directions by Matt Stevens. Now this… this is gorgeous. I’d resolve the opposite though… I don’t ask for directions enough.

Check out more at the To Resolve Project.

via Fuel Your Creativity

“Airports help to put us in touch with the idea of alternatives — they relativize us. They make us think that right now, be it at 10 a.m. or 3 p.m., somewhere on the other side of the globe, very different things are happening. They do that very basic task of the places of travel: to jolt us into remembering that the world is stranger, more exciting, more various than we imagine it when we are in familiar surroundings, and in danger of boredom and routine.”

-Alain de Botton

via Ben Casnocha: The Blog
from the Los Angeles Times

In this way, vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal–not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, 97

Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 22

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 a map, with strangers’ contradictory anecdotal evidence. … Times when some architectural detail or vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home. Stories that make the familiar strange again… Conversations that make everything around them disappear. Dreams that I forgot until I realize they have colored everything I felt and did that day. Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way, though there are other ways of being lost.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 13

“We travel too, of course, with our own capacity to touch, and to bless. Hands connected to eyes that see and ears that hear are no small thing; they can even change the world…or at least a life or two.”

Joel on Vagablogging
(Click to read the full post)

Traveler, there is no path
paths are made by walking.

Antonio Machado, Cantores
qtd in Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, 87

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

Maya Angelou

From Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts