Erratic Landscape (2013), by Sari Asih

Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled.

The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one’s own being. The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon, and cut it’s way across the empty sky, and sink below the western horizon. This was the only perceptible change in our surroundings. And in the movement of the sun, I felt something I hardly know how to name: some huge, cosmic love.” – Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

These are my notes from a recent solo travel through China. What touched me the most was how I much I enjoyed my solitude – walking in unknown places and setting my own pace. I came back home with a new perspective borrowed from this unknown landscape. This essay is my way of sharing with you my internal landscape during that memorable, momentary solitude.