ribbon bookmark 2
Sally Schneider

The other day a friend came over carrying the book she’d been reading on the subway: Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. We were struck by the lovely frayed, striped ribbon she used as a bookmark. Such as swell little idea: a fragment of beautiful ribbon, perhaps leftover from gift wrap, repurposed into a lovely bookmark. And then it occurred to us that beautiful, intentionally frayed ribbons (similar to ‘improvised life’s business card) would make unexpected and charming ‘extras’ to give with a book.

And the book itself turns out to be a beauty, right up our alley:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote…It read, “How will you go about finding the thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since…

…The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration—how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

Ten pages later, we found this:

 That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. 

Wow………

With thanks to Merete Mueller, whose film Tiny: a Film About Living Small is getting some serious film festival action.

Related posts: mimimalist book bar/paperweight (d-i-y or buy)
‘tiny homes: simple shelter
open art books as decoration + artwork
reader survey: what are your favorite bathroom reads?
m.f.k. fisher’s “mystic materialism of a hungry woman”

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