A Field Guide to Getting Lost

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is an argument for uncertainty as a necessary condition of discovery. Through essays that braid geography, history, art, and personal reflection, Rebecca Solnit treats getting lost not as failure, but as an opening—a space where attention sharpens and new forms of understanding become possible.

For American Cyborg, May became a month of intentional disorientation. After March’s cultivation of delight and April’s mapping of AI’s material consequences, Solnit offered a counter-map: one that values wandering over optimization, humility over mastery. Her work insists that not knowing is not a deficit, but a stance—ethical, creative, and political.

This mattered deeply within an AI-centered year. Machine systems are designed to eliminate uncertainty: to predict, classify, and route efficiently. A Field Guide to Getting Lost resists that impulse. It affirms that meaning often emerges in places algorithms would smooth over—at the edges of maps, in silence, in waiting.

May functioned as a preparatory month. By honoring ambiguity, Solnit’s essays loosened the reader’s grip on control just before June’s confrontation with empire, extraction, and power. Getting lost, here, was not an escape from responsibility, but a way of relearning how to move through the world with care.

In the American Cyborg archive, May stands as a reminder that stewardship requires patience—and that sometimes the most ethical path forward begins by admitting we do not yet know the way.