Sicily 6/27/24
I have a theory that the draw of checking the various communication apps is connected to the deep desire for the divine to answer us. We are enchanted by the idea that we can speak to someone who is not physically present. I am not sure if dopamine plays as big a role in telephone dependence as we think it does. It’s rather that it takes away the pain of God never answering, and this is particularly true of social media, where we are hearing from people whom we admire. No one is enjoying themselves when they keep refreshing the same things all day, every day; there’s something else that it’s doing for them.
I started taking the pull cart to the spring in the forest. The long hill on the return trip makes my calves burn like hell, and I’ll never again attempt fifty liters like I did the first time. Usually I go in the evening, but I hadn’t slept and I desperately needed water. Mornings are a busy time in Sicily, while everyone tries to get a little bit done while it’s still cool. An old couple driving through the forest to the farm down the road stopped twice, there and back, to chat with me. Why did you leave your door open? he said, this villager I’m not sure I’ve ever met before. My door was just barely ajar, there’s no point in locking it, but he noticed.
There is an enormous fig tree, two or three stories tall, that I pass just past my house. The fruit is beginning to ripen, and they’re the size of tennis balls. I filtched one the other day; it had a purple and white interior and tasted like pure sugar. I’d been eyeing up another one that looked ready to go, but I knew it had to belong to the big, beautiful house with the opulent garden across the street.
On my way back from the spring, an old couple was outside working. She was sweeping and felt bad that I had to haul water, but I reassured her. As I approached the man at the fig tree, I noticed his body was very stiff and he couldn’t move well. He slowly reached out his hand to me: in it was the fig.
In the afternoon, sunning with a book on my wide stone windowsill, hidden by the elder tree, I hear Giro’s daughter passing by with the baby carriage. Her daughter has enormous brown eyes, and she is singing Pretty girl! Pretty girl! Pretty girl! to the baby. She is the happiest, most content mother I have ever seen. We’re probably the same age, but there is no gulf between us as a mother and a not-mother.
What I’ve learned over the last ten days of there being no bus into town, is that you shouldn’t seize too greedily upon opportunities to make life hard for yourself in the hope of forcing a change to come about. If other people are having to get involved just so you can go about your days, the endeavor is doomed to fail. But then, this whole month has been a wild and fast lesson about finding balance: it is not a controlled homeostasis, but rather patience with oneself as the body and mind constantly adapt to the changing conditions of life. The fulcrum of the balance is a positive vision of oneself, a goal so to speak, but not too far ahead in the future.
After a month without a prolonged, hot shower in abundant soap, my skin is taking on a salty, ripe scent. It actually makes me want to get closer to people, not keep away from them, because it’s something about me that I can share with them, my scent. I imagine that they want to be closer to me. I want to be closer to me.
Part of my contentment today is having enough of what I really like to eat, and not just enough, but almost too much. Up in the hills I want meat, beans and salt, but down at sea level I want fruit and biscuits. It’s quite a simple equation but it took me some time to understand it. It could be psychological, that my isolation up here puts the focus on dense nutrition in case I can’t get down to the store again. That’s part of the reason I hate when I’m stuck with just rice and olive oil.
A glorious day it’s been, adapting to the most recent changes, sunning in the window, and taking in the simple, charming goodness of the people around me.