Returning home from author and artist Jennifer Pastiloff’s creative retreat at Locanda Cugnanello in Tuscany, I tried not to make sense of what had transpired during our week at the villa. Instead, I tried to feel it first. For someone who spends a great deal of time thinking, that can be surprisingly difficult.
I let myself return to the rhythm of our days: watching the sunrise in silence, meditating, practicing yoga in the yurt surrounded by lavender fields, eating al fresco at the long table on the loggia, watching the fiery orange sun sink before dinner, and spending hours writing, making art, and listening as we gave voice to things we don’t always have the time or space to understand. Women had come from Turkey, Switzerland, San Diego, South Dakota, Los Angeles, and the East Coast, bringing different lives, cultures, and stories to the same table. The more I sat with the week, the more one phrase kept rising to the surface: falling in love.
During my week in Italy, I fell in love with Tuscany, with the villa, with the women around me and, in some respects, with parts of myself. It wasn’t sudden. It happened gradually, through attention: the whir of the espresso machine throughout the day, the kitchen staff preparing our meals, voices drifting through the villa, and laughter carrying up from the pool.
Jen often talks about beauty hunting – seeking out the beauty in the simple things all around us – and Tuscany is a wonderful place to practice it. There are lavender fields and rolling hills, stone buildings seemingly untouched by time, long dinners under fading daylight, cats wandering through gardens, and Temo the dog patiently sitting at our feet. Yet the more I thought about beauty hunting, the more I realized it isn’t really about Tuscany. Tuscany may make beauty easier to see, but the practice is learning to notice what is already there, wherever we are.
Every evening, I opened the window in my room before going to sleep. The stars appeared so close that they felt as though they were inside the room with me. Night after night, I lay in bed staring at them, reluctant to close my eyes. Last year, those same stars felt otherworldly. This year, I felt closer to them. They seemed less like something I was looking up at and more like something I was part of. Maybe that is what the spaciousness of the Tuscan sky gives me: a reminder that connection is more available to us than we realize.
I ventured to Italy this year wearing a medical boot. A few weeks before the trip, I had torn my posterior tibialis tendon, making it difficult to put weight on my right foot. The boot was big, clunky, and heavy. I’ve walked around in heavy boots before, metaphorically at least: after 9/11 and after losing first my mother and then my father. Being physically shackled to one for weeks, however, was something new.
The literal weight of it slowed me down. It made it harder to stand, harder to walk, and impossible to run. When runners passed me, first in Florence and then in Siena, sweat dripping from their brows, the familiar desire to be out there beside them moved through me. Yet when I tried to locate the sadness or self-pity I thought I should be feeling, I couldn’t find it. For once, I wasn’t fighting the thing that was keeping me still.
If I had been the sole boot girl of Tuscany, perhaps that would have been enough. But life, with its impeccable sense of humor, had arranged something better: another woman on the retreat arrived wearing a medical boot on her right foot. Whereas I had torn my tendon during run number hundred thousand and something, she had fallen in heels before presenting at a conference and fractured her foot in two places. I wouldn’t have wished the injury on her, but there was something hilarious and unexpectedly comforting about finding my fellow boot person in the middle of Tuscany. Of all the people who could have shown up, here we were: two blondes, two injured right feet, two enormous boots.
There was a sweetness in the coincidence. We had both arrived in boots meant to keep us still at a retreat asking us, in so many ways, to find our freedom and our voices. Each time I felt the weight of mine, I could look over at her and smile. Here we were in this improbable, magical place together, unable to run anywhere and perhaps, for once, not needing to.
Beyond my boot mate, I was in awe of the people around me. The writing talent alone was extraordinary. Again and again, I found myself thinking, Where have all of you been hiding? The women were funny, insightful, thoughtful, and resilient. Some were navigating complicated family relationships. Others were healing from losses, searching for confidence, finding their voices, or learning to trust themselves again. The details of our stories differed, but the emotions beneath them were familiar.
The undertone of the week seemed to be, Tell me your story, and I’ll tell you mine. Whether we were eating, painting, writing, walking, or gathering before dinner, conversations formed and reformed throughout the property. There is something almost sacred about being entrusted with another person’s story, and equally powerful about realizing that your own can be heard without being fixed, explained, or judged. Strangers became people who felt deeply known, not because we knew everything about one another, but because, for a little while, we allowed ourselves to be seen.
Laughter was just as present. Not polite laughter that fills empty space, but the kind that leaves your stomach hurting. One morning, our resident comedian, musician, and author, who SNL has somehow not discovered yet, tumbled out of the yoga yurt, caught herself on a lavender bush, and promptly landed on her back. I laughed so hard I thought I might collapse beside her. The older I get, the more I think joy may be one of life’s most underrated forms of wisdom. A meaningful life does not have to be a serious one.
Last year, Temo the dog seemed to appear exactly when I needed him. This year, it was Francesca the cat. She arrived at the precise moment I needed to get out of my head and return to where I actually was. As I stroked her fur and listened to the hum of her purr, the worries occupying my mind receded. Nothing in my life had changed. Those concerns were still waiting for me. But for those few minutes, they were not the only things that existed.
I found something similar in one of Jen’s paintings. I looked at it every day, and the longer I looked, the more there was to appreciate. New details emerged; pinks, plums, golds, and yellows revealed themselves in waves of warmth. When we rush, we miss things. When we stay, more reveals itself. I forgot to ask Jen if she had a name for the painting, but I have one: The Shape of Us.
One of Jen’s practices that always brings me back to myself is May I remember. In a life so often filled with to-do lists and the feeling that I am always trying to catch up, may I remember to make room for one small thing for myself each day. May I remember to breathe, to look around, and to trust. May I remember that the holiest thing we can do is be human together. We don’t need the same answers or the same path. We need room to be ourselves and to remember that our presence matters.
In Jen’s first book, On Being Human, she wrote, “the moon is never missing any of itself. We just can’t see it. People are like that, too.” That idea stayed close to me in Tuscany, as it had the year before. We encounter different versions of one another depending on timing and circumstance, but underneath those changing phases, our wholeness remains, whether we can see it or not. Even when I don’t feel whole, whether because of my frenetic heart or a medical boot on my right leg, none of me is missing. I do not need everything to work perfectly to be fully myself.
This year’s retreat felt different from last year’s, not because the retreat had changed, but because I had. There has been so much loss in my life, and I can acknowledge that now while also knowing it did not break me. For years, I wrote about my parents and their deaths as though there were some hidden meaning waiting for me to uncover. I thought that if I wrote enough, I might eventually figure something out. Instead, I discovered that writing about them was teaching me more about myself than it ever could about them. This year in Tuscany, I felt more at home in who I am. Not healed, cured, or finished. I’m not even sure those are destinations anymore. I simply felt more like myself, and I hope I continue moving in that direction.
For much of my life, I believed running long distances was how I got to know myself. I will always love the freedom of covering ground and seeing the world one mile at a time. Last year, my heart forced me to slow down, and this year my ankle continued the lesson. As someone who has always moved, I am becoming curious about what I might discover by staying still. Who am I when I’m not in perpetual motion? What happens when I stop running long enough to listen? I don’t have the answers yet, but perhaps for the first time, I don’t need to rush toward them.
On the last night of the retreat, we read the speeches we had written for our 100th birthdays. This year, I wrote:
….I found my voice. Not all at once, but over time. And once I did, I learned to trust it. I took the trips. I embraced the adventures. I accepted challenges that scared me. I kept believing in people, in possibility, and in the idea that every new chapter deserved a chance. What makes me smile most, though, is remembering how much fun I had. Not just when I was young. Later, too. Maybe even more later. I let life live within me. And what a gift that was. What a beautiful life.
When I returned home, I realized I don’t want to wait until I am 100 to say those words. I want to keep beauty hunting, listening to people’s stories and sharing my own. I want to laugh until I double over, take the trips, embrace the adventures, and begin again when life asks me to. I want to trust myself enough to know when it is time to stay and when it is time to go.
Nothing became perfect in Tuscany. Nothing needed to. We simply paid closer attention to what was already there: stars glistening outside an open window, a cat purring beneath a hand, women telling one another the truth, and laughter spilling from a yoga yurt into a lavender field.
Perhaps falling in love is not always about finding something new. Sometimes it is about staying long enough to see what has been there all along. And sometimes, just when life gives us a heavy boot to carry, someone appears beside us wearing one of her own. We recognize something in each other, we laugh, and somehow the weight becomes lighter. Perhaps that, too, is a kind of falling in love.
