SELF-GEOGRAPHY

Another lovely day.  

Recently I came across the concept of self-geography.  Wasn't quite sure what it meant, and in sating my curiosity, found these explanatory quotations......

⛯There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.  Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.  ~Josephine Hart, Damage, 1991 

⛯There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.  ~George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876

⛯To uncover new stratas of myself.  To drill down to unknown levels.  To uncover beds, and veins, and pockets down in the untried depths.  ~Muriel Strode (1875-1964), My Little Book of Life, 1912

⛯Come, happy crowds of atoms, and be housed and at home with me.  Come from the fields, the seas and the hills.  Drop from the air, oh, atoms that make my body, that gather so cunningly, that out of your rhythmic and ordered millions make this metropolis, Myself. .........Sometimes pestilence sweeps this city, and there are strange fires that play over it.  It has its holidays of rejoicing, its twilights of melancholy.  There are days of terrific toil, there are nights of sleepiest peace.  And lo, here is my city, right here composing me at this moment.....Isn't it all unbelievable?......So lately come into existence, so soon to vanish.  ~James Oppenheim, City of Myself, 1916

⛯The soul of man is like a countryside....what bog and fens on every side extend.  What desolate moors that seem to have no end, dotted with little gleaming groves of thought!...~Harry Kemp, The Soul's Cartography, in Munsey's Magazine, 1921 

⛯ I hope that in after-years when I read over the pages of this diary, I shall not discover that it takes a sextant, a compass, and an alarm clock to find out where my heart is!  ~Kate Trimble Sharber (b. 1883), At the Age of Eve, 1911

⛯This is a contour map where I may read with reverence your soul's geography--The heights, the depths, stark valleys of our need, the luminous peaks of love's bright ecstasy.  The lines become more lovely with the years.  ~Author Unknown

Kinda makes me wonder what a map of one's life would look like.  When I think of self-geography, I imagine a map of one's inner self.  Just imagine a map of our daily emotions, our daily reactions to actions, our most cherished moments, and the depths of our darkest sorrows.  A map showing every emotion we ever felt.  The concept of self-geography holds a wealth of space for contemplation and self reflection.  This is the self-geography map that I can envision......