Excellent.

An excellent book ...

SECRECY, or HOW to be INVISIBLE

Society does not understand the concept of unplanned time or non-planning.  You may be criticized, judged, or ridiculed for your activities.  This is best avoided altogether.

No one needs to know about your wanderings.  It is okay to have something that is just yours.

Your thoughts are powerful and need time to emerge without distractions.  This can only be done in solitary fashion.

Wandering is an ancient and powerful tool.  When you you wander you are connecting to a group of great thinkers who used this tool to further humankind and for good.  This path is not for everyone.  You are entrusted with the knowledge of its power and should only pass on this knowledge to others who are able to honor it.

Secrecy allows members to conduct research quietly and covertly.

She had the added sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown.

Virginia Woolf     

Keri Smith, from The Wander Society 

Learned.

We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know – that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.

Beryl Markham, from West with the Night

Flâneur.

Coordinate.

Here I stand before a big question mark. Here I stand like Hercules, but not at the crossroads — no, here there are a good many more roads to take and thus it is much more difficult to choose the right one. It is perhaps my misfortune that I am interested in far too much and not decisively in any one thing; my interests are not subordinated to one but instead all stand coordinate.

Søren Kierkegaard

Wander.

Mapping apps help us find the fastest route to where we’re going. But what if we’d rather wander? 

CONNECT

Enjoyably.

Sing.

Böcklin, Pan Among the Reeds, 1859

Of Pan the flowery pastures sing,
Caves echo, and the fountains ring.
Sing then while he doth us inspire;
For all the world is our Pan’s choir.

Andrew Marvell, from "Corinda and Damon"

Interest.

Waterloo, Traveller near a Wood, 1868

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER

CHAPTER I—HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS

Allow me to introduce myself—first negatively.

No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me.  No round of beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie is especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally addressed to me, no hotel-room tapestried with great-coats and railway wrappers is set apart for me, no house of public entertainment in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my opinion of its brandy or sherry.  When I go upon my journeys, I am not usually rated at a low figure in the bill; when I come home from my journeys, I never get any commission.  I know nothing about prices, and should have no idea, if I were put to it, how to wheedle a man into ordering something he doesn’t want.  As a town traveller, I am never to be seen driving a vehicle externally like a young and volatile pianoforte van, and internally like an oven in which a number of flat boxes are baking in layers.  As a country traveller, I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered by a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station, quite a Druid in the midst of a light Stonehenge of samples.

And yet—proceeding now, to introduce myself positively—I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road.  Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way.  Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London—now about the city streets: now, about the country by-roads—seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others.

These are my chief credentials as the Uncommercial Traveller.

Charles Dickens

CONNECT

Mercilessly.

de Witte, Interior of a Church, 1680

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

- Franz Kafka

Imperative.

Overwhelming gaiety,

...insupportable grandeur,

... sombre desolation are flung at you.

Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. 

The only imperative that nature utters is, ...

"Look. Listen. Attend."

- C.S. Lewis

Wandering.

I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with.

- Plato

Attentiveness.

Ten times a day something happens to me like this - 

 ... some strengthening throb of amazement - 

... some good sweet empathic ping and swell. 

This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: 

... that the soul exists ...

... and is built ...

... entirely out of attentiveness.

- Mary Oliver

Thank YOU, Jess.

Wander.

Vital.

How does life build the vital currents that we live from? Where does the magnetic force that pulls me toward this friend's house originate? What are the essential moments that made this presence into a vital pole for me? What are the secret events that mold particular affections and, through them, love of country? How little stir the real miracles cause! How simple are the most vital events! There is so little to say about the instant I want to recall that I have to relive it in a dream and speak to this friend.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Rosebery.

Michigan.

For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian water do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they have yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their pelty wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs gives robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the birch canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

- Herman Melville