So as I gear back up for the week, a confession: I’m in proposal writing stage–the stage I find most unsettling, as a writer. I hate this stage. It makes me want to do anything else but write, though I know that write is often exactly what I need to do.

Since I know lots of other folks who are in this phase right now too, thought I’d share some wisdom from a writer who is new to me, Rebecca Solnit. A few tidbits from her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

“‘How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?’…The question…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.”

“[There’s an art] of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.”

“Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found.”

Um, here’s to being at home with being lost?! Anyone else got good some good quotes to share?!