Arriving | Sicilia

*I have arrived home. This is not maybe the best way to describe it. I am here. But haven’t quite fully landed yet. It takes time on this side. It takes my body time to remember. It’s ok. Part of how I land back here is resting, paying attention to who is around me, giving myself space to love, to go slow, to write. I can’t say that I am happy to be back, but also, I am. Of course. And also, It’s really hard this time to be here.

I sat with the river this morning and just allowed myself to write about whatever came. Because that is the practice here — remember. The process. It’s not the product. It’s the art of process. And I realize — this is how I live my life. And how I live Sicily, too. So here it is for you. Thank you for being here and reading the words.

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I’ve landed in Sicily many times, 2016. 2017. 2019. Then Covid. When I lost my mind and thought I would never, ever be allowed back there. But. 2022. Again in 2022. 2023. 2024. Again in 2024. 2025. And god willing, I will land again in 2 months from now. I guess that makes 10 landings, over 500 days on the island, and holding space for 16 immersions (well over 100 people, I’ve lost count) to date.

From the first arrival, to this last one, things really shifted. My purpose there went from being about “me” to being about “we”.

It went from what I wanted to “what is needed”.

It went from being alone to almost never being alone.

It went from beginning with an agenda to actively being ok with not having one.

But arriving, arriving always feels the same.

It’s not just stepping off a plane. It’s something slower. Stranger. An altered state or a meshing with a veil. A crossing of a threshold. I don’t rush. I don’t arrive all at once—my bones come first. The heat hits my skin and my skin arrives. The sunlight shatters my sight, breaks it into a thousand small particles. I see mountains and the sea touch, kiss, connect. The invitation is to be aware of more. To expand my vision. But that means creating space and needing less. I don’t ever really know how, but somehow my body now knows how. Things fall away, and I let them. My body / brain understands where it has landed. My spirit drags behind for a moment or two, unsure. Because it’s not just the work of the body. It’s leaving one world and preparing to re-birth, to arrive within itself in another and those timelines collide. Intersect. It’s slowly bringing all of myself together again. Past, present and future. Not just my body, but ancestral bodies.

It’s many arrivals all at once. Another plane of existence perhaps- and maybe even another— all braided together—who am I to say? All I know is that everything feels marvelously twisted together and I just have to go with it. I know I sound dramatic. But, welcome to Sicily.

The fact that I keep arriving keeps telling me there is still so much cpressure and tension, so much mystery, so many layers that have been untouched. I know nothing. So I keep arriving.

The arrival isn’t a moment, either. It doesn’t end once the plane touches or my feet touch ancestral land. The arrival is a continuous circle.

I walk to gather my luggage and I have to consciously let go of every single expectation there may be— even the fact that the luggage may or may not be there. Saying a prayer as I walk through customs that I will crack open a little more, empty some more, so exposed, so oozing, my heart so very splayed out as a TV screen with subtitles.

I pray I will be humbled. Because that feels like pleasure. That I will be surprised. Because that feels like god. That I won’t know until I know. I will do all this again and again, almost every day. I guess arriving is an art, a process, an ongoing thing.

The big arrival is always at the volcano though.

I’ll lose my breath and sweat pools in my lower back and have to rest and go slow and breathe deep as I offer all this body to the volcano. Not long after that plane lands, there is no other choice but to go to her. This is where it becomes official that I have arrived. Until I go there, I am not sure if I am ever really fully there. To walk on the Mother Fire, the source of the underworld and her pending expression — tells me who I am. Until she knows I am there, and I remind her I am there as well, and she says welcome, the arrival is still liminal.

Then I am maybe ready to begin.

That arrival should always be long, drawn out, tiring, unsure, beautiful, hot, immersed, confusing. Held. No matter what, I feel held. The land knows me now, I think.

I hope I never land on this island and think “oh here again”

Or think “I am so at home I don’t remember how to behave”

Or forget to go up the volcano.

I hope that I don’t arrive so many times that I don’t remember what a fucking privileged it is to be able to arrive. To be here. To do this work here. To hold others while they do their work here. I hope I never make this feel “normal” but also continue to normalize the urgency of this work. I hope the work with each other, together, the work with the dead through the land of the dead through the culture of the dead through the rhythms of the dead — the remembering the joy of the living — never ends until I end and then it becomes even more.

The first time I came, I made an itinerary. I color-coded the days. I had a goal. To find the paperwork for my nonna — to unearth information that would reveal something to me about her. Her why. Her mother. Her how. My why. My how. Who I was.

And the island, in her perfect ancient way, laughed at me. She was so gentle though. She held me close. She alone mapped my every step. She knew my fragility. My desires. She knew there was a sensuality in my ancestral work and I needed to be carried in that mystery. She held me close but she didn’t let me choose the path.

She also knew my bravery and my single pointed vision of ancestral healing, of belonging. So she did what she was going to do with me and I didn’t even realize I was letting her. I didn’t fight it. I never even considered fighting it. I had gotten good at submitting to higher powers - this happens when you mother daughters.

The island eventually led me to the mountains, the mountains, the ones at the heart of the island— the ones I call home to this day— and I thought why am I here and why am I staying here so long and why do I feel I have finally found home here? Why is this my place? Why is everyone welcoming me like a homecoming?

This isn’t the village or the commune of my nonna or my nonno, though not far. This isn’t the land I was expecting. This was high up. Overlooking the wheat from above. Not deep in the fields. Why do I feel like I found my grandmother in wild borage? Why did I find her in a statue I only got to see because I peeked at her behind locked doors of a sanctuary that stood higher than I have ever hiked alone before. I peeked and I saw the most beautiful mother and I knew, I knew where I belonged. Why do I feel this way? Why has time stopped and I could finally feel my body sink into earth, all illusions of disconnect, gone. Totally gone.

I find asking questions without expecting answers much more potent than making statements or waiting for responses. The questions are part of the map. They are the ever changing waterways to follow.

The reason I went to the mountains, and felt all this, will be revealed but not for about 2-3 years later. I had to just trust and wait. The reason is the island tells me where to go. What to do. Who to find. Who finds you. And you just do it. I’ve gotten really good at listening to this, even in a group setting. I hope the folks that come with me here feel this within me and the space. It’s not being benign —it’s not that I don’t have a plan. I do, it’s that the plan will most likely collapse and it’s how we hold what the real plan is. It’s being a child of a volcano and allowing the mother god to guide us. There is no guidebook. There is nothing written. This is what I am good at. It’s the magic. It’s why I do what I do.

Letting go of who I thought I was and who I wanted to be and what I wanted to find… that is the lesson.

I am not the center of this world or even my own ancestral world. I am just a small note within a large song. I am barely a poem. I often thing how dare I write a poem inside this magnificent wordless poem, this oral tradition of a place?

What I have to say is hardly a curve on the letter j. But here I am. Trying.

It turns out, the moment I actually arrived was when I stopped thinking about why I was there. Stopped worrying about when I would have to leave. Stopped caring if I “learned” anything. Stopped. And just stopped more. Until I was entirely held. And then things were just passed to me.

I started listening. Letting the land show me how she moves. Letting the people set the pace. I learned to wait. I learned to ask. I learned to trust when someone said, “Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe never.”

I listened when someone told me their way of life was “today I woke up, I looked out the window, the sun was shining, the volcano was there, how perfect today is — and so I will save my worries until tomorrow.” Why hurry the worry? Why expect things? Vedenniu Faccienu. We take things as it comes.

I learned to never turn away the offer to walk and get a gelato with someone I just met. It may be the last time that person ever has a chance to show you how good their local ice cream is.

I learned to never say no to a dinner even if it was meant to begin at 11pm and it was 5 courses long. It may be the last time you learn how to properly fry a stuffed sardine, or make fennel fritters from someone, it may be the only time you hear of this specific Sicilian jazz band that changes how your brain hears music.

I learned to never turn down street musicians who want to give you an impromptu concert even when your bones are so tired you could lay down and sleep right there. It may be their biggest gift, and fill their heart with exactly what they needed to remember their music is beautiful.

I learned to never question the weather. The weather is not here for us to question.

I learned when the winds come, close the windows. I learned the winds can indeed bring insanity and fill your gut with sand.

I learned to never demand food that isn’t part of the cultural landscape. I learned to love what grows straight from the land and how it’s made, when, why. I learned never to send back cheese.

I learned to eat raw pork.

And intestines.

I learned to drink, but not get drunk.

And I learned what it looks like to see men become their own soft, fierce divine feminine, together.

And learned that statues are alive when the community believes them to be.

And learned what women look and feel like when they embody the sacred profanity of their land, their blood, their bones. I learned they know there is no duality in sacredprofane.

I learned that my folk ways are intricately connected to the indigenous way of being- still alive from 2000 years ago. That what my elders taught me isn’t so far off from what they have found buried deep in ancient soil.

I learned that snakes and volcanoes are kin.

And that ancient salt inside mountains creates a frequency unlike any other.

I learned that drumming is more than just a name or a song it’s a way of being, of healing, of coming together in care.

I learned that initiations aren’t always pretty and almost never are.

I learned that I have so much to learn.

Why when we arrive somewhere, do we assume we are going to get what we came for, or at least what we want? Because when I stopped that nonsense — I got more. Way much. I am still receiving. Days and days and days after I am no longer there. The gifts continue to pour in.

Sicily will not be hurried. She’s an old soul with sea-brined feet and a thousand ghosts in the form of prayers that slur erotically out of her mouth. She is snake hair and fire womb and salt aura. She is a mother’s heart. She is dark red soil. She teaches you by undoing you. Exhausting you. Activating you. Stuffing you so full you think you may die and then you allow yourself to die. You actually welcome the death. You are turned on by it. And then you get to wake up and eat it all and die all over again.

I create a container for whatever this is, this kind of magic, which isn’t just travel. I mention it because it’s important. To my writing. To my living — to the way I want to embrace and grind up against life. It’s Radici. It is the roots, the roots of who we are as human, as beings, as movers and seekers. When we get right with ourselves — we enter into another culture in integrity. When we allow ourselves to belong to our own roots, anchor them deep, we don’t have anxious expectations. We don’t expect others to change for us. Instead we devote ourselves to changing; for each other, and then for the entirety of the world. I know, so dramatic, but welcome to my inner Sicily.

It’s a life philosophy. Radici. The words are only just becoming, are only just being born. They are seasonal. And seeds are stirring.

My teacher is an island. My lover is an island. My nonna is an island.

And also the people — with unbroken lineages of the island. They are the life that carries this on.

It’s how we show up in the middle of change. In the middle of longing. In the middle of a life that isn’t clear yet. It’s how we let go of the story we thought we were writing, and listen for the one that’s trying to find us.

Radici was born from this rhythm. Not from a business plan. Not from a launch calendar. It was born from desire and trust and scattered poems written on sticky notes. It was a born from a plane ticket bought doing tarot readings. I still only find hope and joy in making pen and paper lists. I cannot be managed and neither can this creation of mine. It is what it is. It will remain sacred. And it will do what it needs to do.

From a bone-deep sense that the land was asking for a different kind of guest. From my own need to return—not just to Sicily, but to myself. Again and again. And it’s my prayer that others also feel this too. This is what it’s about. Like Medusa’s snakes — they just want to reach out and become us. And we want to become them, too. Like the volcano. She just is changing the landscape from the better whenever she reveals herself. The snakes just keep teaching us how to shed skin.

If you’re feeling that same pull, that holy unrest, that ache to arrive in your own life differently, I got you. Come with me. Let the land lead you.

We don’t have to know the whole way. We just have to show up, and as my friend Jessica said a couple of weeks ago as we walked the cobbled path of the village together “we get to be kids again” — and this might be the most honest, the most true sentence. We don’t know anything! And yet we get to become the newness and joy — over and over again.

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