Pip-pip, cheerio, what-what!
Busy weeks = fewer posts. Recent highlights include sharing Greenwich and Borough Market with Allie, Kristen, and Caroline; being told that I look like Kate Middleton (While this isn't true in the slightest, I will shamelessly accept this stroking of my ego. Cue daydreams of being a diplomat's wife/arts patron/style icon...); and raspberry-chilli ice cream from Borough Market. Never have I ever thought of such a thing, but boy, does it work.
Tonight I went into the city for a goodbye walk, because it is suddenly, somehow, The Day Before I Leave. With a million other faces I shot through the city veins, and I realized that soon being surrounded by Finnish and Afrikaans and Italian and Spanish and Japanese conversations will no longer be a part of daily life. There will not be this particular diversity of faces, fashion, voices all around me. Greenwich will not be a four-minute boat ride away.
I am thankful for six months of so much beauty. Today as I was trying to explain to a friend what these six months have meant to me I realized that they have allowed me to rediscover and recharge my right-brain dominance (which had been rather starved for attention in analytical Washington, DC and is currently bracing for re-entry). Turner, Morris, architecture, music, parks, cooking...In the beauty of making, ordering, delighting in creative possibility, discovering the boundless variety of raw materials upon which to unleash our creator instinct -- There, more than anywhere else, I learn the generosity, delight, patience, humility, and love of God. Rilke's words become my prayer of praise: In all these things toward which I feel this kinship and closeness, I always find You: basking like seed in the very smallest and giving Yourself greatly to the great.
Tomorrow I leave the Mother Country, head to the Fatherland for a few days, and then spend a few weeks under the Tuscan (and Sicilian and Roman and Venetian) sun with this beauty before returning to the homeland. There will be a zippy little rental car and Italian highways involved, so I trust I shall return with stories. Also wine, and hopefully a decent sketch or two. Cheers London, you've been brill. And I'll be back.
Tonight I went into the city for a goodbye walk, because it is suddenly, somehow, The Day Before I Leave. With a million other faces I shot through the city veins, and I realized that soon being surrounded by Finnish and Afrikaans and Italian and Spanish and Japanese conversations will no longer be a part of daily life. There will not be this particular diversity of faces, fashion, voices all around me. Greenwich will not be a four-minute boat ride away.
I am thankful for six months of so much beauty. Today as I was trying to explain to a friend what these six months have meant to me I realized that they have allowed me to rediscover and recharge my right-brain dominance (which had been rather starved for attention in analytical Washington, DC and is currently bracing for re-entry). Turner, Morris, architecture, music, parks, cooking...In the beauty of making, ordering, delighting in creative possibility, discovering the boundless variety of raw materials upon which to unleash our creator instinct -- There, more than anywhere else, I learn the generosity, delight, patience, humility, and love of God. Rilke's words become my prayer of praise: In all these things toward which I feel this kinship and closeness, I always find You: basking like seed in the very smallest and giving Yourself greatly to the great.
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| Photo: Jessica Arnold |
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