(Written at 3 a.m. Sunday May 19, at the Hotel Meininger. Timestamps mean nothing in a place where what happens happens and if you don’t have WiFi you don’t!)

 

I came here with a sense of déjà vu I can’t shake, rode into Rome overwhelmed with a feeling I honestly can’t identify.  I have been here an infinite number of times, yet I am here for the first time.  As I pass some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, I remember the lines to poems I wrote so long ago there could be no possible connection.    Italy feels like universal human experience, something we all have memories of encoded within our DNA.

 

My trip to the Vatican made me refocus.  I was very angry there (not unwilling to experience it— just the opposite.  One should experience a thing completely before they decide they definitely don’t condone it.)  I was angry at the gross excess, that I was born into a belief system that made me believe I was made wrong, and how easy it is for some people to excuse themselves while condemning others.

 

Then I connected with the notion that “a small spark” of divinity is alive within each of us, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  (I can’t post the picture I definitely didn’t take.)  If a person like me can have any sort of spiritual revelation at all at the Vatican, and parts of my own belief system can be found there alive and well on a Saturday morning.. nothing is what we think it is and everything is worth doing.

 

But is it really just a small spark?  An accurate human brain drawn around the image of God suggests that we are the creator in addition to the created.

 

Walter Pater (English art critic) postulated that the female figure God is protecting represents Eve; the 11 other figures symbolize the yet unborn human race that will come from Adam and Eve.  The Catholic Church refutes this interpretation and considers the teaching of pre-existance of souls as heretical.

 

The Catholic Church loves to hide universal truth by gaslighting people into believing they don’t inherently know it.  No factory, no matter how mismanaged, could produce a product that is defective 100 percent of the time.  Even a broken clock is right twice a day.  It is not logical to assume God would create things that weren’t perfect already.  We have put too many of our own standards into something we have limited resources to perceive or understand.

 

That said, I look every day for a window I saw in a dream. I am still waiting for the smell of fresh coffee brewing and I am still waiting for that rain.  (It was most definitely not this morning’s rain.  Will it rain in Firenze?  Unpopular opinion: I hope it rains every day.)  I look everywhere for faces I recognize and signs that we really are all connected.  I look for the cognizance of this in others, hidden wisdom in offhanded remarks and encounters with total strangers.

 

When I find someone unique and special, it is worth it.  I talked to a teenage guy working at the mall at Journeys a few weeks ago about life and death for almost an hour.  He was  into philosophy.  I learned more in that hour than I have learned in entire semesters of school. You never know who will teach you something profound in an unexpected place.  I was trying (briefly, because it’s impossible in 5 months) to become fluent in Italian before this trip so I could really talk with shopkeepers, waiters, and artisans to hear about how the world has changed for them— and whether they have the same questions I do.. or if they have those ones answered and different questions.

 

If nothing here is the same and food doesn’t even compare, imagine the difference in  their wisdom and perspectives.  I see now that they are not “better” than we are.  Their culture is older.  They have and do things we don’t.   They are wise in different ways, and about different things.  We are parts that make up a whole, and we are meant to travel to learn the parts of ourselves that only exist here.

 

And Mariani’s lecture more than anything changed my opinion of my own country.  There is so much more to our collective intellectual history than I realized. When learning about how Italy assimilated parts of American culture (and some seemingly random parts), I started to understand the real purpose of travel—and why all the years I took road trips with my late Grandfather, I was given no option otherthan intellectual curiosity.

 

He knew.  This was the best thing I ever did for both of us.

 

Our own country isn’t garbage either.  If I really tried to look at things there through the same lens I am seeing things here, I would definitely appreciate more.  I need to try harder.

 

No one needs to understand your whole experience or what you take from this, and no one will or should.  I have seen 99,968 selfie sticks in Rome.  Not understanding why on any level is a sure sign I am getting old, and I definitely do not have a problem with that.

 

I can barely even sleep here for fear I will miss something cosmically important to me.  I will be crazed in a few days (probably already am) but nothing matters more than having the questions I have answered and moving onto different questions.

 

I chose graffiti for my image because I love how here, imperfection is perfection.