Home from Italy five days. Last Thursday I travelled from Firenze to Roma, and on Friday I travelled from Roma to home. Today was the first day I didn't wake up before 6am! Edgar recognized me when I came back. My ankle still hurts after a long walk. Little tchotchkes have been distributed, dirty laundry is in the hamper, I've made a couple of meals, and my to do list has been replenished.
I have an incredibly long emotional delay on events. Combined with a sort of intellectual laziness to draw conclusions, under normal circumstances if you asked me what I did and what I thought you'd get a responding "yeah, you know, ok, stuff. I did stuff."
I'm attempting to challenge that vegetative state, which is why I blogged, if for no other reason than when I went soft in the head I could direct my friends here. Something did happen.
And what happened was more of an inside job, more intimate than I care to entirely share here. While I was gone visually consuming pretty churches paintings fashion art architecture mosaics pattern rhythm, apart from following CNN/bbc/sky news reports on ghadaffi, euro meltdown, and the Michael Jackson doctor involuntary manslaughter trial, I read and listened to WAR & PEACE, listened to a radio doc on George Harrison and the material world, read the big book, and watched The Borgias. Understandably, this bit of information would be more than the blah blah medieval peasant would consume in a lifetime, but for me this was a relatively narrow band of information. Four days ago I could have explained the meaning of life, and how all these bits were interconnected, me included. Now I'm just back to blithering.
I sat in a chapel the day I left Firenze, alone, for a long time. It was a door across the courtyard from the hotel, and every time I had ever used that entrance, the red doors to this church were unequivocally closed. The day I left they were open, so I went into a dark cool aged space of flickering candles and long sad faces, and sat down in one of the pews and was still.
Travel is stressful, filled with lines and noise and and harsh light, and cues to be continually mindful of. One pinprick of stillness deep in my chest was the best thing I brought back. Maybe it's the philosophical and spiritual underpinnings of War & Peace, or the penny dropped on Bills's story, the blissfulness of connecting dots for even a couple of hours, my friends emailing me support through a self-loathing blip that rivaled any twenty feet of muck I've already swilled and been suffocated by, or maybe it was just the right time for birthing. The next chapter.
I'm not a traveller. I know that now. I would rather live well every day, than sacrifice a year of good living for two weeks of lineups in an exotic locale. I don't believe in exotic anymore. Globalization has homogenized many of our values and day to day experiences. For the kind of places that I would go, it's not different enough to warrant a looksee. My overwhelming desire from this trip, apart from good daily living, is to own land, savor everything bright beautiful and ugly, and find that stillness again.
So I've been cooking mindfully, rather than buying and wasting food for the family of six that does not live at this address. I punctuate the day with multiple espressos. I work three hours a day doing things I would rather not do, and spending the rest of my time following a whim or doing exactly what I want to do, without guilt. I'm grateful for a nice home, less traffic than Rome, my sister and Clive, good friends, food, a beautiful fall day, a sleeping dog nestled beside me, books, music, knitting, central heating, and choices. I will have to put my mind to "The Next Chapter", but it's already here whether I want it or not. This afternoon I'll meet Stephanie for a coffee down in the beach. We'll sit on the bench outside the remarkable bean with Edgar in the sun. Life is good.
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