On Italy, and Following the Charm!

Camogli - Liguria

There is a subtle, significant and life affirming beauty to getting in touch with the thing that lights you up. Sometimes, it is just a whisper here and there. Sometimes, you don’t know why you have the idea, but it lights you up anyway and gives you a bit of energy, a feeling of possibility. Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense, but you feel it anyway. Sometimes you think who am I to do this thing?  But, the truth is who are you not to? All of us have ideas, some quiet and wistful, some loud and buoyant.  Sometimes, our ideas present in the guise as little bursts of jealousy - I want what they have got!  There is always a message in the feeling of envy….  Don’t discard that gold nugget, yes, look deeper.

There is beauty in the gathering of heart awakening details, in whatever way it is that presents itself, a holy yes. This holy yes though, sometimes get sniffled or pushed aside. The little yes you felt knows something, in some respects it behaves as a directive or a source of joy.  I have learnt a lot about this in the past few years.  Saying yes to the quite voice inside of me has been a process of self possession, of self examination and analysis. Don’t get me wrong I still get stuck, yet the caterpillar has to go through a few stages of metamorphosis before one can grow wings.

For me, it was Italy, of all places. Europe too. France a bit, but definitely Italia.  Beacon and lifeline - place, landscape, detail, vision, all of it. The cafes, the every day bar, details always pouring forth…. Ornate balconies, peeling yellow cafes, small white saucers of coffee, ashtrays on tables, waiters dressed immaculately, pressed white shirt, black tie, coffee bars pulsing with people, life, conviviality, noise, warmth, colour, white walls, veridian splattered ceramics, a glazed bowl, teal and glistening waters, towers jutting off coastlines - so romantic - bougainvillea trailing on a mountain side, steps to a secret doorways, fading, eroding, crumbling architecture, deep layers of the past, volcanic soils, porcelain madonnas, cyclamen plants and votives burning, old churches, plates of pasta - steaming hot and made better than anything I could concoct at home, baskets of bread, fried zucchini blossoms, sparkling Prosecco, table wine or aperitivo that lasts two hours, lemons, truffle, olives, cypress, people watching, women and their mothers arm in arm, la passagiata, hello culture - you are so welcoming and refreshing to my weary soul. Italy, trusted source, muse, beautiful illusion or a grand wish. I could move tomorrow, I already know that….

Turin - Caffe Moments

But let’s go back…

About a year ago, I started cleaning out a room in my house, a place where I keep a bunch of boxes, books, craft, fabrics and old cards and papers. Since we have lived in this house for thirteen years, it was a long ignored cupboard in my daughters room. It was time to repaint and I had some work ahead of me. And what do I find again and again, in boxes, on shelves? Old Italy calendars and diaries. Each one I opened had some reference to Italy, notes to self, wish lists, to do lists, all of it, sweet messages, words calling me, places calling me, signposts and lanterns. All illuminating something valuable and intrinsic to my heart. Something alive.  The Italian postcard and journal was trying to tell me something.

I opened up Tuscan diaries from 2001, 2006, 2014. If I don’t get the message in this, then nobody will.  We get to decipher the signs.  We get to listen to the call, and yes it might be subtle at first, but it might also be loud and visual too. I started to laugh to myself - hello Italy, yes, you have always been there.

It made me smile as I bumbled through the years of memories and pieces of my life I had clung onto. What about the classic book Under the Tuscan Sun? Yes, I bought that in the 90s and I was only 23 or so. A pinpoint on a life, an x marks the spot moment, but I didn’t know it. Not then.

The thing is, there was always a part of me that wanted to deny the attraction, or not make the real effort, or didn’t quite believe that there could me something more it was trying to offer me. Or more so, where would it even lead? But that is the thing, the whispers of your heart don’t always make sense to a mind that wants to know how and why and is perhaps to meant to justify it too…. well that’s my reality,  but that is just the ego and that can be a trap….

I was aware on some level that it was inconvenient. Inconvenient in a marriage, inconvenient to the people around me, to my kids, to the every day kind of mouse on the wheel life. And even when I started the podcast, there was a bit of who do you think you are?  A little snickering on the side lines of my life. Many of you get it the need or desire, but IRL over here, was not quite seeing it.  I knew this was me on the side kind of thing, but underneath a small flame was flickering.

Even now and then I still open a magazine and see a picture of Sicily, or the Medd somewhere and get that pang. I have this wistfulness glaze over me. An opening of sorts, a portal even, a remembering. Even if I haven’t visited that part I am whole body attracted, and get sometimes even get this feeling that part of me is missing here.  Part of me is not quite whole here at home in Australia. I am here and I am there. In Australia, I am a little bored - dare I tell the truth. I can remedy it, and I do, but its always there. I heard the writer Sue Monk Kidd say in an interview, “Whatever brings us alive, its something we should follow, {that} the yearning in ourselves, it’s talking to us”.  Kidd is right and I know it.

Yes, follow it, own it, a place can have its way with you. Those words just came to me, but I am pretty sure that is a quote by Frances Mayes. And so it can, it is true. I know this from experience that owning it clarifies something, it says, yes your ideas, your dreams, your feelings they matter. They do matter, and they want to be expressed, even realised… They want a place not only inside of you, but outside of you. They want to be realised.  And that is powerful…  

Frances Mayes wrote in the book - A Place in the World, in the past few years she said, “Acting on an irrational desire that arises from some deep place may be one of the best decisions you make in your life”….  Yeah and why does everything have to be so darn rational? Why do we have to rationalise our beautiful yearnings, or our life for that matter?

I realised I had to follow the path, follow the inkling, the deep knowing. It wants an anchor. I may have been tempted to disregard Italy as a topic of interest, a subject in essence, but over time I started to the let the roots go deeper, travel again, alone, read, study, explore more, buy the books, revel, wax lyrical on the podcast, much more. Go deeper. Stay longer.

And I stood right here and made a podcast watching the magic of the Venetian Canal unfold….

And so if it wasn’t for this persistent nudge of inspiration, the podcast would not have happened and the books I am writing would not have happened either. Nor the gorgeous conversations and little meet ups on Zoom. They have filled my cup. I always get off smiling feeling deeply connected to something bigger. All of this, have been sweet sources of joy for me, deep and true to my core. And don’t get me wrong, there has been a kind of reckoning along the way, I have had to question my ego, my motivation, my truth, and I have, many times. I have asked again again, why this and not that? Am I trying to escape something or am I just a creative woman who has the ability to sustain another level of life? Yes, I am good for it. I feel alive when I am creative.

Podcasts and Zoom Meetings (waiting here for my guest!!) 

Why does it matter?  Well it matters because it matters and because I feel happy.  Hmm, alive and happy, how many get to know what that feels like? Is it over there, or is it right here? Even the writing about it makes me feel happy. So yes, a joy bubble, a full body yes, an activation, in the here and now. We live this life and yet what does being true to yourself really look like?  How do we marry all sides of the equation?

For me, it was permission to do it. Permission to fail, permission to grow, permission to feel excited, enthusiastic and inspired, permission to let go of something else that was frankly boring, permission to be true to myself - that’s the jewel, sounds so nice and clean and inspiring but honestly it takes balls to be frank. But, I will tell you something, something I have discovered along the way. You have to be prepared for the resistance not just from yourself at times, but from some of the people around you. Some will get it and some will definitely not. But the real resistance I think comes from within mostly - while I can blame life for getting in the way, there are parts I have to own.

My inner resources are also allocating a certain amount of time and expectation too, it isn’t all rosy over here, every day I fight the doubt. I am greatly inspired, but it is always a two sided coin. When I am tired or frustrated well then, I have noticed that is when the inner critic gets loud - very loud. But I am getting better at ignoring that voice. But yes, every day I have to start again. I have to decide, am I going to keep editing this travel book? Yes Italy I am. Am I going to buy the cookbook for the author I want to chat to? Am I going to allocate time, resources, energy? But seriously, it is deeper than that, the bottom line is, on this quest, on this journey of becoming is this….

Am I going to trust myself? Am I going to listen to the whispers, to the inspiration? To the calling? The desire that seems to be with me night and day. Yeah, its persistent.  The question remains…  Am I going to put this first and not last?

Permission is lots of small, incremental things, choices that happen along the way. They can be subtle these choices because they stack up over time.

Sometimes I think it is permission to explore a topic or a place, Honestly, it can look like so many things…

Every day we have to decide. Every day it is a tentative new beginning. Every day it is the question, is it first or is it last? It takes practise, another P word, first the Permission and then the Practice, everyday. I would call it a spiritual practise, yes I would.  For a spiritual experience is having your spirit engaged after all. Alive. It’s a knowing. 

I was away doing a Vedic Mediation course at the end of 2023. I was reading the book by China Galland, Longing for Darkness - Tara and the Black Madonna, a great travel adventure book. Galland traveled through Asia and Europe and wrote about her search for the Black Madonna. She said in the book, in dealing with her own addiction to alcohol, that Jung shared the alchemical formula, in latin, “spiritus contra spiritum” - she wrote it takes ‘spirit to cure spirit’. They were obviously talking about pain and numbing here, and I get that but I realised that the low spirit issue can be only healed through a high spirit moment. I underlined this, and much of the book is dog eared, thinking I could tattoo this on my arm.

I think when you are on a journey, let’s say a kind of heroes journey for yourself, where convention and artifice and expectation keep rearing its head. Well then your spirit - your inner spirit is going to have to get engaged. Because nothing else will suffice, nothing else will lead the way. The voice of your heart and soul may have given you an inkling, a green light, but it’s going to take some reckoning and consistent energy along the way to keep going in face of it all. This I do know. The truth is if we are addicted to wanting the approval, or being seen a certain way, we are fragmenting ourselves.

This transcendence that Jung was referring to here, is the spirit awakened. And yes, I do recognise, the fact that spiritual thirst can be substituted by the remedy of a glass of wine… I didn’t mean to go so deep, but there it is…. Even if Jung was referring to addiction, I realised there are parts of myself that have gone underground for fear of rejection. I realised, if the thing is important to you, if you are important to you, then nothing else will remedy it. I know that much. I like this quote by Meggen Watterson from her book Reveal, “you are not crazy for wanting more out of life. You are not selfish or greedy either. You have been initiated”. Yes, expansion is calling and it wants a vehicle.

I am sitting here writing this. I have my Duruta ceramic cup, blue and white, one with a coffee and one with a herbal tea. I love the cleansing deeply warming and grounding element of a hot tea after a cappuccino makes. All home made, with my Bialetti MokaPot, the 10 cup version - I couldn’t live without this. I am eating riccarelli biscuits, I love these sweet almond cookies that I make when I have spare egg whites, actually I make them all the time, but a night ago I made a carbonara, which traditionally uses a few egg yolks. I didn’t want to waste the precious egg whites from our chickens. I have a few books scattered about, about six journals, magazines, more books, mostly non fiction.

I love these details, they reveal a sensual life. I want to explore beauty, colour, art, taste. I want to know more. There is a subtle grace in pleasure, that goes beyond giving or receiving it, although that can be activating and enlivening too. Grace in the mundane and the every day, in the fallen wet leaves, in a yellow tulip, in the clouds and the sky…. Like Emerson said, “swim in the sea, drink the wild air”. In the second you just slow down and really connect with what you are doing and what you are seeing. At home, in the street, trees, art, colour, tone, beauty, pleasure. Yes, nature transcends all material consumption, and longing too.  

I received a book, not too long ago, a gift from a friend, a beautiful book too, How to be an Artist by Jerry Saltz. I thought it would be words I have read before by other luminaries, but no, Saltz gets to the heart of the matter, “train yourself to look deliberately, and the mysteries of your taste and eye will become clearer to you”. Training yourself is not too challenging, slow down, take a second or two, look at the yellow stamens and the white camellia, she was there all along waiting for you. Look at art. Transcend, breathe. Open a book of Dante or Mary Oliver or Louise Gluck. Open a cookbook, put on ‘Vivaldi, Philip Glass, Federico Albanese, open Virgil or Anais Nin, if so inclined. Allocate time to bathing in pleasurable things, the senses awaken and so does your joy, because the loop in your head that goes around and around gets hijacked by a good feeling, a high note, a pulse. The muse is here, she was always waiting… The subtle genius on your shoulder wants to give you wings.

Another tangent,

I love that the poet Emily Dickinson never went to Italy, but she wrote poems with Italy at heart.

Here is a story, that was illuminated by the book Their Other Side by Helen Barolini. Dickinson was moved by the books of the novelist Germaine de Stael. The idea of Goethe’s journey to Italy lit a match in Madame de Stael’s shoe. Men had conquered Italy, the ancient and the mythic, writing their critiques and their memoirs, sharing events and historic dialogues. The book Corrine, or Italy - a written by a woman in the age of Romanticism by Madame de Steal, a woman ahead of her own time, and in exile since Napoleon couldn’t handle her powerful voice (he had admonished her for political verve and writings). De Stael had a quite the effect on women at the time, likened to opening ‘pandoras box’, in the words of Barolini.  How I love opening Pandora’ s box.  She activated women to seek Italy, to travel, to defy convention. Or at least, dream of it. These books of de Staels influenced the likes of Elizabeth Barrot-Browning, George Eliot, Margaret Fuller, and indeed Emily Dickinson. 

In the book, Their Other Side author Helen Barolini describes the stories of these educated women and how the effect of Italy moved them to not only travel, but to write, move abroad and change their lives. She says “Italy was a goal and a magnet precisely because it was so much the other”.

I love that Barolini felt the pull to explore six women and their lives and how the lure of Italy had cast its spell. It was simply a poem by Dickinson that became a portal for Barolini, an Italian American who recognised that literature was flooded with Americans writing about Italy, who indeed had no roots or ties to the country and yet she writes, “so much of the writing on Italy is not from the long lost or straight child of the motherland, the Italian American, but from those who have adopted Italy as a generous foster mother”.

Oh the lure, the longing, chartered through pilgrimages and writings, journals and letters.

Dickinson too, felt the energy of the place, a quickening to channel words, ephiphany, thoughts and imagery into her poems, recognising that Italy was the spiritual source of something beyond mere normality, something unique and potent and perhaps resonate with a sense of freedom. Oh freedom - is that what we are seeking?  I recognise it myself.

Free from restraints, the mundane, the everyday, the work and expectations. Free to explore beauty, free to explore art and walk into the beautiful unknown.

Can a place be an archetype?  Or pertain mythical qualities?  Dickinson never left her home in New England to travel, the Italy she wrote and dreamed of symbolised something else… joy, hope, freedom. And ultimately, the most powerful of qualities - transformation.  Italy was more than a subject it was a tool for resurrection and empowerment. Hmmm, I sense a quite possibility. Is Italy the vehicle of my own becoming?

And so, Italy the land of beauty, passion, elegance, fashion, art, history, decadence, potentiality, rebellion, superstition, spirituality, seduction, escape. Yes, she is all of these. A sublime force that can be subtle or nuanced, profound or just another place on the grand map of possibilities. And so, I have realised you don’t actually need to actually physically be in a place for it to have an effect, that the qualities of the land and culture can make them selves known and felt through other channels. All the simple things I listed earlier, the coffee mug hand painted in Italy, the cookbooks, the recipes, they are symbolic and meaningful to the creative person who resides and indeed makes a life, lives a life, that picks the basil, and creates the tomato sauce, this person has qualities and needs and desires that move in many directions.

I started to follow the clues. There were plenty around me, on my bookshelf, in my kitchen, in the colours I choose. In the trees I would plant in the garden, in the terracotta pots - all of it.  I recently remembered that when I was 18 it was back in the early 90s I had moved out of home and was buying my first plates and bowls.  I drove over to Paddington, in Sydney and on one of the main roads they had what was called the Reject Shop.  Now this was not like a $2 shop that it is now, it was the original reject shop, all the seconds of kitchen paraphernalia and much more, fabrics, tablecloths etc. I just remember they had these plates, they were all of these bright painted plates, with just a thick stripe or yellow, sea green, ultramarine blue, and hot pink. They were exactly like you see these days in magazines imported from southern Italy.  I loved them, and still have a few to this day, out in the garden in fact, but it was just a beautiful little thing that I was attracted quite early on, fatally attracted you could say to something I didn’t realise was actually Italian.  It didn’t stop there, of course, more ceramics over the years, more books, non-fiction and fiction, coffee table books, gardens in Italy (or France), film - Enchanted April, Wings of the Dove, The Talented Mr Ripley, and on it would go.  All bread crumbs showing me where the spiritual sustanence was coming from. 

I heard this quote the other day and it really got to the heart of the matter “desires are a prompting from the internal, spiritual part of ourselves urging us to go in a certain direction so we can experience our own completion” - Jan Spiller….  Here I believe, curiosity is key. What if the desire and the yearning is saying that more is waiting for you, and more is good thing.

Just one of my book piles, they seem to land all over the house!

When Helen Barolini read the poem, Alpine Glow, No 80 it ignited her. She understand something, that a place could resound in someones soul, it could be a part of them. Words are powerful. Dickinson knew that from the core of her being. When she sat at home in Amherst, New England she was in touch with something grander, higher, she let that feeling of transcendence and freedom echo through the sentence, alive in the ink, spilling onto the paper, in touch with beauty and passion, the raw open places where that magic lives, on the page and in our lives. A poet can do that. The poem Alpine Glow would anchor Barolini and give her the inspiritis to write a few books on the subject of women and Italy. Barolini suggested in her work that Italy was a “creative catalyst”and a vehicle of transformation at heart.  Hmm that resonates. 

The thing is when you have a passion, an interest, a curiosity, a North Star, you don’t want to ignore the signs, you don’t want to abandon your hearts longings.  Generally they will remind you - but every now and then they go off to find another open heart. You want to give into them every now and then and you want to trust there is a true message, a signal, a deeper and purer knowing, about you and about your path in life.  The subtle pangs have a gift, they are trying to breathe new life into you.  The are trying to say welcome I am here.
The mediation teacher Tara Brach said, “There’s probably nothing that feels more valuable than getting intimate with our own hearts” - Yes, there you go, true intimacy with your life can be a beautiful and wild ride, a true journey of the spirit.

BOOKS, PODCASTS AND RESOURCES THAT GAVE ME INSIGHT ON THIS PART OF MY JOURNEY….

Their Other Side: Six American Women and the Lure of Italy by Helen Barolini

Reveal: A Sacred Manuel for Getting Spiritually Naked by Meggan Watterson

Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna by China Galland

A Place in the World & Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

Tara Brach quote from her conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow on the Goop Podcast 14/11/2023

How to be an Artist by Jerry Saltz

Sue Monk Kidd quote - In conversation with Oprah Winfrey - The Life of the Soul Podcast - Oprah’s Super Soul 28/11/18

VISUAL DIARY EXCERPT - THESE JOURNEYS CONTINUE TO FLOURISH OVER THE YEARS TOO. ONE TRAVEL ADVENTURE CAN HAVE SO MANY CREATIVE POSSIBILITIES OVER TIME.