Patchwork Views and Cobble Strolls
I walk down an ancient cobbled path, to a view of vast rolling hills, like a quilt draped over a pile of sleeping cats. Squares of green tufted candlewick trees, a plain beige patch here, a striped green and brown vineyard there, a golden plowed field with mustard peeking through in vivid yellow.
Descending steep stone steps, I see a grotto with a statue of Mary to the right, and a marble bare-breasted maiden to the left. Viva l’Italia!
The wind is soft as the sky, with its gentle haze muting the colors—just a little. Italy doesn’t do ‘muted’ for long.
I arrived in the dark, delivered to the tip-top via a treacherous drive up, up, up, inches away from the craggy crumbling bluff, the driver confident and nonchalant.
The thing is, that’s how to do it. Perceived danger is a funny thing. Like the light mist, it can be gently dismissed by a calm confidence that all will be well.
A surprise gust of wind catches my attention and hair. Yes? I ask the sky as if it will answer. I often open my ears to the possibilities, the avant-garde, and the muses skipping and floating, invisible and playful.
“You see me?” I ask out loud as my dark tresses flail about. “I see you, too.”
Talking to the wind is not crazy. It is connecting to all that is, not just the plain old atoms and molecules and facts and the concrete.
What is wind, anyway? Molecules, tossed about wildly, carrying the atoms of people and trees and dinosaurs and stars. That’s the real circle of life. Oh, the stories an atom could tell.
A cat, its coat patched in shabby gray, meanders, nonchalant as the driver, and is on her merry way after a rather royal sniff to my offered hand. A queen walking among the common folk in disguise, her cloak didn’t fool me—the flitting tail was a dead giveaway.
Silver-edged clouds glow uncannily, stealing the scenery—they want their moment, too.
Patchwork clouds and patchwork fields and patchwork cats; patchwork atoms and patchwork me. We’re all just pieces of each other, really—we people, animals, earth, sky… cats.
I smile.
I’m no philosopher, but that sits well with me, as I sit, well, in Umbria.