After an editorial project that enchanted me day and night for a month, I’ve spent days getting back to myself with yoga, deep-tissue massage, and exotic literature to whisk me into other inner worlds.
This morning, noticing my mind had again wafted back into the project – one that altered my deep interior and will nourish me for a long time – I flipped open a book to reset my imagination, to open up the Present moment. Made of two-page story-chapters, it lets me absorb one in minutes, wherever I happen to land. At first I was disappointed that the one I opened didn’t match my feeling-state, as intriguing and beautiful as the story was.
But a deeper wave of perception was set in motion by the juxtaposition of that story and my subtle mood. I soon felt the inner-outer commingling of art: The changes wrought in me by the editorial project had started to blend with the story in my hands: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities…
“… [In] Euphemia, where the merchants of seven nations gather at every solstice and equinox…. [y]ou do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market … at each word that one man says – such as ‘wolf’, ‘sister’, ‘hidden treasure’, ‘battle’, ‘scabies’, ‘lovers’ – the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when … you start summoning your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battles other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and every equinox.”
In this image, with its meanings about subtle receptive creativity – the ways we are altered by our encounters, the ways we are edited by the stories of others, in real time, in history and dreams – the nature of life itself is revealed, in cyclical seasons with magic moments. This is a treasure I’m pleased to share around the campfire. If you absorb it, I like to imagine your interactive life will be lit by it.
Photo Credit: laurenjord via stockxchange