Endless Forage

For years now, but not at first, touching down on the tarmac in Pisa or Florence or, diving into the glow on some long country Tuscan road, the buzz and release of coming home envelopes, then transports me. 

To what? This was an arranged marriage of sorts. The bond wasn’t guaranteed to take hold or endure. At first, the road was a place to get lost, to forget. How many casualties of mind were needed before the light began to take me in? A battleground of losses and victories can tell the story:  

A soul, having lost its compass, is taken in and given the elemental gift of hospitality: a space to pause without the road ahead, or the road behind, taunting in either direction. A bare room with a single window where it is okay to have forgotten and where the destination need not be known. 

Only at such pauses, sheltered but not far from the traveled road, did the light begin to poke holes in me, reminding me where the true journey takes hold and endures. 

Nowadays, I vow I am in love with this place called Italy, but I reckon in my objective mind that the place could have been anywhere. Anywhere which provided fodder for this odyssey of preparation. In simpler terms, the work was already mine to do and this particular terrain was before me.

We are still working on opening up to the impending light which is everywhere. Yet, the more merging with light, the more desire for it, and the bare room with one single window becomes cluttered with belongings and reminders of the light, rather than simply the light itself. 

This traveling out there and in here is going on in continuum. We start out lost, we learn the landscape, we build a home; out there and in here. We forage endlessly in fields of light for that approach that buzzes and envelopes and transports. To what? We move toward it with intuition, knowing we need the practice because our journey is long and perhaps the ultimate destination is a light which cannot yet be imagined.