Familiar and Foreign

And so it is that you wonder what you will see today.
The same place. Alternately familiar and foreign.
You are not the same person you were on that first visit
and you know how that plays out.
Everything you will see will be new.

Except the feeling.
Except the soul of the place
which is not its soul at all,
but yours.

About this poem.

Strangely, this poem was inspired by a friend’s Facebook post about “A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter Miller. A seminal book I read when I was in college. A wonderful story of doubt, wisdom, changing times, and the challenge of knowing truth. I named one of my cats, Leibowitz, after this book. (My favorite cat ever, as it turned out); inspired by that memory, though you’d never know it unless I told you.

We’re about to take a trip overseas. Much of the journey will be places I have been before. And yet, little about me is the same. Then, I was not far from a painful divorce, and in a new relationship. I was still more broken than I knew. I had just moved up here to Vermont, which was another new place to me. I was finding my path to healing, to being more compassionate, to reclaiming my creativity, to learning how to see again. It was a time of brokeness and emergence, all at the same time.

Today I am mostly healed. My scars are familiar but they no longer hold me back. I am ten years and some into a relationship that turned into a marriage. I have learned to paint and reclaimed my writing of poetry. I have become more spiritual and indeed that side of me colors my life and work. I have learned how to see, to the point that it is second nature now. Every photograph has a poem in it. I see emotion, not things, when I aim my camera and take up my brush. I have, after 70 years, come to grips with and like who I am. This is a time of adventure, growth, and unexpected energy as I careen into old age.

I was looking at some photographs as I wrote this poem, trying to find one that fit, and chose the one at the top of this blog entry. It was taken by my daughter. I was struck by how, in the photographs I like best of myself, I am always holding a camera. It’s not that cameras make me look better. No, it is that those pictures capture something essential about me, the trying to see and understand and capture the world I live in.

Below are some shots I took in Italy the last time. I can’t wait to discover what I see this time around.

Tom