Reggio wandering

We slept til 11AM. Literally. Then pulled ourselves together and went out wandering in the city. The colors here are so beautiful, each one playing off the other in a palette of Tuscan beauty.

I have to say that my nature soul is missing soft earth and the open splendor of wide horizons but the brick and stone streets curving down alleys opening onto inviting piazzas are beautiful in their own right.

There is an inordinate amount of graffiti here and all of it appears to be fairly recent. It is interesting. This one struck me. The artist suggesting a bunny, projecting a shadow hand onto the wall, was such a wonderful inside-out perspective. It reminded me of one of the lessons of this trip, drop your assumptions of what IS and allow space for what can BE.

I'm looking forward to a return trip home on Saturday into David's arms and my boys' sweet smiles.

Comments

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment. It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float. It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within. It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains. Eyes closed. Eyes opened. A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being. It takes courage.

tree digging

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grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...

angelbirdflies

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