I'm on my way to Italy!

My family and I are off for an adventure in Tuscany, so posting for the next two weeks may be infrequent. If I can get to a computer, I will post now and then as I reflect on ways of anchoring wonderful travel experiences back into other goals and plans. My intention is to fully enjoy the trip while I live it and to ensure that it is a reasource for me in the days and weeks that follow.

Among the many things that excite me about this trip are the opportunity for incredible sensory richness - a feast for the tastebuds, eyes, touch, sound. I am looking forward to the sound of Italian, to listening to another language with all the absorption I have learned, allowing myself to know a language as potential rather than foreign, allowing myself to respond to rhythm and pitch and expressiveness, free from the leaps of logic that come with too much content.

And I am excited about art that will pull me out of myself and into bigger models of the world, of cities that were ancient when Arthur was king of Britain, of hills and sunshine and laughter. Excited about having my experience and modeling the experience of my sons as they reach out into the world. So many opportunities to enjoy experiences beyond my own while also thoroughly living my own experience.

What will be different two weeks from now? I will step back into my life, my work, step back into the stream that is and is not the same stream. I will have new memories of resourceful states, a new sense of possiblility, a renewed faith in how joyful a thing it is to build on the experiences of other human beings - the ones we meet, and the ones who lived in different places and different times and left their footprints in arts and roads and buildings.

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