Day One.

04/02/2024

I’m sitting by the fire in my room to sit and think. Although I am not sure how necessary that pastime combination will be for me anyhow because if I’ve understood anything from this first day it is that all times will now be spent thinking. Standing and thinking. Showering and thinking. Building and thinking. Eating and thinking. Sunbathing and thinking. Sitting on a bus and thinking. Each task slowed down here, slowing down for the self to surface, no longer suppressed until the moment we find release at some metaphoric windowsill. Here, that sill materializes as a fire that I sit by, although I don’t know the name for the apparatus that houses it, nor do I suspect I will find out in English as least. English doesn’t have much of a place here, and I can’t help but to feel that neither do I. But my instinct tells me this is simply a thought I need to discard. An illusion of the self once again, for I am not English. I am not words nor simply the thoughts I manage to construct. Instead I consider a note I wrote to this family with whom I’m currently residing in northern Italy, words that I had written and yet didn’t really understand. I wrote that I wanted to spend the next period of my life listening rather than being listened to. A simple and grandiose statement of intention. Well, I am rather curious and I know somewhere deep inside that if I were to find any answers, such coming to would only happen with a receptivity and somehow provocative constitution. Only, the most profound mark of this engagement did I initially miss and which settles before me now. To listen, to receive, to find, and to ultimately allow yourself to be changed by it all, is to give something or somethings up. It is to give away, and to let go, to allow room for something new and most likely greater. How much more noble than being listened to, whose nature is to fill the space instead. Am I ready for something like that? Do I know how to do the opposite of fill? Would I lose grip of my very existence by not imposing it? Would I be left with anything, and would that be so bad? Jotting this down, I feel that old feeling when I used to torment myself with the concept of eternity. Something that never ends in either direction. I used to see how far off the wall of safety I could push, how much fear of it I could stand, how long I could float in that place of apprehension. The feeling feels something like the sentence “I could never begin to know what I could never begin to know”.  Except this time, I’m not a child in the night self-inflicting unresolvable questions. Although, I am fucking up this fire, which is embarrassing seeing as it should be the only thing I know how to do. Apparently, Elena can do it so well. Well unfortunately, I grew up cushioned. I start thinking, what if this is also my chance to publish something? With all the time, not to mention the value, this could be why I am here. Of course, there doesn’t have to be one reason why someone moves to Italy (absence of soul-sucking internet or processed foods or men who don’t meditate). But tomorrow I will begin brainstorming ideas, and write them as well. This is where people come to do exactly what it means to live. To take care, to enjoy, to breathe, to paint, to taste the fruit.

11/10/24: Note by author: She never brainstormed ideas to write about. How could she? There was so much more in front of her waiting to be seen.