Writing 1: Ephemeral/Site

 Rebecca Solnit introduces the idea that "strange places are always more frightening than known ones". Stating that wanderers make a place less strange, less dangerous, and less lonely. This concept of the importance of wanderers, or in other words walkers, create the dynamic of place. "So the less one wanders the city the more alarming it seems" she states. This coincides with the establishment of public spaces, spaces outside of the interior. How in a new age everything is interior, which strengthens the idea that if there are less wanderers then the exterior will be more unfamiliar and alarming. This concept to me is an argument on how walking benefits the collective in addition to the individual. Public spaces, walking, and wandering are all benefiting the growth of the collective. Wandering is an act that keeps fear away, keeps cities alive, and debunks myths. If there is a decline of walkable cities then there is an increase of strange places. In a broad sense, wandering is the way of truly knowing a place and becoming familiar with it.  

               Watching Rivers and Tides, Andy Goldsworthy early on states that he does not enjoy traveling because it uproots him and makes him a stranger to a place, where he has to quickly begin working while being out of touch with the land. Goldsworthy is a wanderer himself, using his way of exploring and understanding the land as a means to create. He reveals that when he was an art student himself, he would leave the office studios to go outside and walk. As Solnit states, "A desk is no place to think on a large scale." His art is outside, and when it is perceived in the interior the meaning changes. He understands the feeling of being a stranger to a place, and when he is able to create roots there by wandering is then when he is no longer a stranger. Being outside, wandering, creating, walking, these are all things Goldsworthy knows and does. Concepts that Solnit introduces in Wanderlust.