I recently returned from Italy. Actually, to be honest, part of me still resides there. I am unwilling to let go of the exquisiteness that I experienced while exploring that sacred, ancient country."A bacio." Like a kiss...
In San Gimignano they use this phrase to describe a particular type of experience...
Fleeting beauty. The transient quality of the greatest, most authentic experiences in life.
Like THE kiss...
There is something so absolutely perfectly delicious about an extraordinary kiss. That moment in which two people leave everything else and surrender into each other and the spontaneous, absoluteness of what they are experiencing together.
EVEN AS IT HAPPENS IT IS GONE!
As soon as you become aware of the perfection in that moment, it has already passed.
Like the first bite of something long-awaited.
Ice cold water after a long, hot yoga class.
Plucking a tree-ripened apple and taking an immediate bite.
As soon as you recognize the taste as it dances across your tongue, it is already no longer there.
We spend our lives unknowingly chasing after these butterfly kisses - sensations and experiences that were never meant to last but nevertheless leave an indelible, lasting impression.
Is it in our nature to wish to capture that which we can never keep? Like a bird in a cage. A bird is intended to fly.
A kiss held too long loses its appeal.
A kiss that we can no longer have seduces us eternally.
The first bite is sometimes just enough...to simultaneously bewitch and gratify our senses.
The perfume of angel's trumpet that lingers for only a moment before the breeze carries it away, has greater power to captivate our memory, and hold us hostage... to the idea, the potential, that which we held for only a moment and then somehow lost.
A bacio.
The fleeting beauty of something irreparable, irreplaceable, unique in its occurrence and its rapture.
A bacio.
Like a kiss.
A one-off. The mold has never existed. No matter how you try you can never exactly replicate the experience. (Thank goodness!)
As soon as it exists, it is already gone.
So authentically and purely beautiful that it is beyond description. Words do not suffice.
A bacio!
I will spend my life stringing these moments together. Creating a web of beauty beyond the measure of time, beyond the description of words.
I know with each moment I am getting closer to the one who recognizes this beauty, who surrenders willingly, who offer generously and who will share this journey alongside me.
