Peace Piece

"Ghosting" is a term I've fairly recently become aware of.  It generally has a negative connotation, as in someone is ignoring you, turning their back on the world, going AWOL.  Absent without leave, implies you need permission to disengage from the world, that fundamentally you owe it to others to be at their summons.  I disagree.

These days I am feeling a little like the ghost.  I am fully absorbed into a bubble which consists of myself and Keith with some contact once in a while with family or friends.  Day to day it is just he and I, engulfed in a timeless landscape, surrounded by voices we hear more as music than communication.  There is much space for contemplation, for sorting out what matters and what does not.  This is something I have trouble with in ordinary life.

Like many people, my childhood taught me the lessons I would need to survive in adulthood. If you are lucky enough to have a peaceful, happy childhood, you have been given the incredible gift of moving forward in your life with peacefulness and happiness.  If, like me, you've had less than that (in my case an incompetent mother and her live-in alcoholic boyfriend who created a fearful and unstable environment), you come away with the skills you needed to survive that situation.  The knack for people-pleasing, distraction, appeasement all served me well as a child and to a large degree also in my adult life.  I am what you'd can an introvert/extrovert.  I can definitely hold my own in public, but it often comes at a cost.  I care too much about making everyone around me comfortable and I instinctively adapt to achieve it.  Often (especially in the work environment) I have found this exhausting.   The habits of a lifetime remain with me still - I'm working on it. ;)

Being away from ordinary life gives me a chance to set aside my adaptive mask.  Nobody here knows me and other than the small interactions I have - the ones my limited Italian will allow - I am a ghost.  There is life all around me - people and conversations.  I have made little stabs at learning Italian over the years, but the truth is, I really don't want to be fluent.  Because I recognize that not knowing the language is more of a gift to me than knowing it - it puts up a barrier I could not otherwise allow myself to create.  This way,  I understand perhaps one out of ten words I hear and the conversation is merely pleasant sound to me; beautiful Italian sounds without distracting meaning.  It is an incredibly peaceful experience to be in a foreign speaking country.  I am in my own thoughts and the words of others cannot penetrate.  Italian speech, church bells, birdsong - they are all just the soundtrack to my days here.  It is peace.  In our little sanctuary we have nothing but gentle, kind, loving words.  And a lot of room to contemplate our existence and the things that are life-giving.