past and...future

I just went through all my photos from when I was in Italy, and it made me cry, to see what I'd managed--to get myself, all alone, over to Italy when I was barely 21, 22--and how much I enjoyed it--

I had some moments there when I abandoned my usual cynicism and agnosticism and truly believed--no, KNEW--that God existed and had made those days just for me.

Looking at the pictures now, years later, seeing me with nothing in the shot but my feet exuberantly, triumphantly in the Mediterranean breakers, the sand wafting up beyween my toes in the current; the mountaintop I climbed to as it was begining to rain over Tuscany, the fields of sunflowers fanning out and away from under me like an unfolding golden relief map, latitudes travelling south and away, with lakes lining up to the west; the gelato I ate in San Gimingiano (limone, fragole, tuttibosco--you ALWAYS wanna get more than one flavor, like the locals do), me beaming from boat decks and low-arched briged in Venice--I am realizing something very important.

God didn't make this happen for me.

I did.




and if I did it then, I can do it again...