I am leaving LA soon. It is a statement that is not factually certain or even vaguely planned but I feel it so surely from deep within me. As I imagine an ocean wave that has been building knows the crest is near and soon will be the respite of the beach. Having traveled miles and miles and miles across the vastness of my last three decades, I have begun to recognize the signs and sense a coming change. The shore is nearer ahead of me than I expected and clumsily I will crash upon it, becoming suddenly unformed and made able to travel once more. Free to choose my next current and my next destination.
I have had Europe on the horizon of so many previous plans but the complications accompanying an intercontinental move intimidated me beyond my motivations. The challenge of having to endure the maze of language and legal access to a country has stalled me at every turn. However I have recently been to Italy and more than any other place I have been it’s rhythm matched mine in ways too ethereal to describe. And so acknowledging the soon to be arriving end of my time in Los Angeles I am going to begining the planning stages of a new journey to a foreign country on another continent in a hemisphere that is not currently my own. Legal hoops can be jumped through, language as a barrier can be torn down with effort and practice and distances however intimidating can be crossed over and crossed back again.
The existential fear of unavoidable mortality (no doubt instilled in me by a long study of French philosophy) has never been so elegantly assuaged as by simply observing the general Italian lifestyle. Rather than surrendering to the hopelessness of our impending deaths, Italians simply live purposefully. Purpose they express more often than not through an evening spent sharing a bottle of wine over a table filled with amazing food and amazing conversation. Or strolling across an ancient part of whatever city at dusk or dawn, reflecting on the passage of time. Modern street lamps shining down on them as they meander through streets that were designed and built many centuries past. It is calming and assuring that as terrifying as it can be to stand at any point in our lives, look forward far enough and see only the imminence of our passing, that countless others have done the same. Many have done so gracefully and openly, and the journey does not have to be fraught with constant shaking fear about something that cannot be changed. We can march to the point where each of our times becomes the time for the next and smile at any and all expressions of genuine love. We can let the music and art and poetry that has come to describe who we are be written on our hearts and try as best we can to write something as meaningful on the hearts of those who follow. So as my California swell draws itself onto the shore may I be drawn back into the sea of life with a mediterranean current at my back, propelling me forward across continents and oceans towards an ancient city where under the warm continental sun I can pass my time discovering whatever it may be that I want to write onto the hearts of those yet to come.