A Year in Review

I was looking for the photo I wanted to use to change my header for this blog, and I suddenly found myself perusing all my photographs from the last year. It stuns me to think about where I've been since August 2009: I visited Costa Rica for two weeks, moved to Turkey and lived there for ten months, visited Egypt for ten days, moved to Italy in June 2010, then went back home to visit the United States in August. What a ride!

I feel so enormously blessed for all the incredible things I've had a chance to see, and find myself wishing that I'd been even more grateful for and curious about the places I stayed while I was there, instead of in retrospect. Yesterday I had a great conversation with my godfather, Bert. When I told him about my life in Italy and my thoughts on relocating here, he said I sounded like I was in a pretty good space with my life, that I had a healthy perspective on the situation. I answered: "Right this minute I do, anyway," remembering my near-breakdown earlier this week. And he replied, "Well, that's all we ever have anyway, right? This minute!"

 It's so true, isn't it? So that's my challenge while settling into life here in Italy: to be as fully present as possible. I'm coming to terms with the fact that I may always have a bit of melancholy for some other place, and that it's okay, but I need to work on being fully present here too. When I was in Turkey, for example, I longed to be in Italy or California. When I was in Italy, I missed my family in California. When I was in the U.S., before all this traveling, I constantly dreamed about the next place I'd visit, and the life of traveling and writing that I longed to begin. And now that I'm in Italy I often miss California and sometimes Turkey--but I'm also happy right here.

Maybe this is just my nature. To always be a little bit uncomfortable, to have a little bit of longing at the fringes of my heart. Maybe I kind of like it. Maybe it deepens me somehow. I think the constant slight discomfort and awareness of what and who I love burns me into something with more shape, more tenderness, more surfaces and angles. It's as if the hole in my heart makes me more aware that my heart is there, beating.

So I spent a couple of hours today, looking through photographs, indulging my longing. I remembered drinking cups of tea on a ferry floating down the Bosphorus near Istanbul, making cookies and having a barbecue with my students in Isparta, goofing around under the shadows of the Great Pyramids, and falling in love under Pisa's leaning shadow. I collected a sampling of my most lovely moments and photographs from my last year, some seemingly mundane, others monumental.

More than anything I felt overwhelmed with such gratitude for all the people I shared this last year with--some pictured here, some not. Each of us carries a little scrap of memory from that shared moment, a different facet of the same prism. Thank you so much for your laughter and compassion and loveliness...and most of all your presence. My memories of you are the best of all.