I have just returned to NYC from two weeks in Italy. I saw 8 cities and towns spanning from Tuscany to Campania and walked well over 200,000 steps. When I got there my friend asked me how I was conceptualizing the trip. I told her that my venture to Italy was in acknowledgement of the ideas I’ve clung to about myself for a long time. Ideas that I’ve come to discover hanging on me like dead wood waiting to be pruned. Over the last two weeks those ideas bubbled up like little armies and at times like cloaked demons over my shoulder, as they daily did before, this time, angry at their starvation. If I let enough time pass while they fired arrow after cannon after gun, they would peel off me like the skin on my sunburnt chest.
One day I sat facing the pyramid of Cestius (a giant tomb from 12 BC). My anxiety felt as if it were dripping down from the gorgeous trees above me: a black tar melting in the hot Roman sun. I sat in pain and did not move. I had nowhere to be and no one to answer to except that tree. What was that tree to me?
Pain isn’t tar falling from the trees, as I realized I had no choice in the matter of packing it in my suitcase with the rest of my baggage. However, I came to observe that I could look in the 500-year-old mirror of my airbnb in Florence and stand still. I could accept my experience enough to subject myself to the tiffany-blue waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea, a water of gentle, intimate rocking. I could offer myself up like Michaelangelo’s half-carved marble figures to the evening winds of Rome saying ‘chip away at the job as you will.’