I wrote this on my way to Italy for an artist’s residency in early 2014.  I remember feeling anxious at the prospect of being away for a month.  Imagine that as a problem!  Italy for a month.  Oh well.

Looking at what I wrote now, it feels connected to my post on searching.  Sometimes searching requires deeper more rigorous inquiry, more vastness in our sensing.  Finding and arriving are about entering the bonehouse, the skinsuit with our hearts intact and our minds willing.  And so I share this today.

Looking out the airplane windows, feeling dulled into ordinariness – a flat airless terrain of fatigue and sorrow.

Then we are in the air.  Look!

Vast pillowy expanses of clouds with a distant cloud rhinoceros and a small ancient upwelling cloud tree; distant shapes like humped mountains and a shiny patch of distant lake like a silvery mirage.

Finger-combed prairies of lumpy clouds.

Now mountains, real ones, sharper and steep-pitched, not like the nubbled cloud ranges.

Here come quick, daft wisps of thin cloud-flocks like transparent geese speeding by.

The clouds meet a soft rim of sky, a seam of cloud and blue blurring into each other, softening to each other like cats napping, fur on fur.  A soft white mat laid at the doorstep of infinite blue, absent all marks and markers of civilization save the noisy pod that carries us.

Now big bulbous boxer cloud heads with ruined noses and shuffled ears rising up out of smooth porcelain plains, like virgin snow or curving shapes smoothed into perfection by a sculptor’s hands.

Now sun ghosts on the Ligurian water, shining, dissolving; light and cloud mingling in the haze, the silver of the reflecting water drifting outward and upward like hopeful angels, full of light, full of prayer.

I have arrived.

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