Something pulled me this morning to re-read Jane Turner Rylands' short story 'Interpreter' from "Venetian Stories". For a brief moment, I wondered why? Was it looking at Toni's shoe photographs, and reminiscing about the stylish outfits I wore in Venice a decade ago, living a fantasy of being a mysterious incarnation of the Russian princess Anastasia? Was it missing the Prosecco and tiny sandwiches of prosciutto and arugula?
It was simply that this story, which I read upon returning from Venezia, was what set me on the path to weave the stories and fabrications of a life I truly did not have, which has finally almost completely become the life I have. I took the trip to Venice as a spiritual journey, having read another book about taking such journeys. I made a pilgrimage to the churches of Venice really. I have three glass birds of happiness and a blue silk scarf to mark that trip. I resolved to go to the opera before leaving, but did not specify the opera house. It seems the very day I was leaving, the opera season began. But on the Air France flight back, a man from Chicago invited me to the last of the season in Chicago's Lyric Opera ~ a Verdi.
I realized later that I had manifested that gift. I've manifested other gifts since then. Some wanted. Some unwanted. But through it all I know that without the creative force of the universe, none of it would happen. What more of my fiction will become fact? Like Bona's little baritone cat Musci, I am singing! It's a hokey little story, but beautiful. Very beautiful. Intricate like an Italo Calvino novel. What "Invisible Cities" await me? I think too, of Yogi Bhajan's words: "Compassion is the ability to forgive the unforgiveable". If I can let go into that forgiveness, my intuition, like Bona's may blossom like a fat camellia. Her story was all about 'intuition', which this meditation is for developing...how could I have forgotten? :-)
A lifetime ago it seems, but really a decade, I walked those calles near Campo San Stefano and the Piazza San Marco. Palazzo Priuli was my home for a while, just beyond a shrine to Mary, and the only Russian Orthodox Church in Venice. In my purple cashmere dress and black wool coat with a hat of silver fox, I wandered. But it was in the churches for the violin concertos and by the statues with the pigeons that my soul blossomed. I felt I had come home, that I had been there before, been a Venetian merchant's daughter, and before that a young Chinese concubine and geisha with bound lotus feet. I was in a lot of pain. Venice was healing.
Spending time sitting with the Flamenco guitarist from Yugoslavia, and sharing grapes. Wandering the island of Mazzorbo to see the cats and one large dog with eyes like a bear. Even through trusting an elderly gentleman there who broke that trust, I found peace in that city. At night I drank Grand Marnier and another famous drink of orange liquer I can't remember that is unique to Italy. I drank to drown my sorrows...I drowned many of them. During the day I sat near the Florian sipping espresso like I have never tasted before or since, and El Moros: hot chocolate with spicy pepper. The pigeons flew around me and I was transformed. Even when I came home, and back to the job as an exotic dancer that I truly hated but made the best of, that city held a sway in my heart.
When I think of it now, Venice, Italy is the perfect symbol for a lotus flower. The city has her toes in the mud, and her heart in the sky above the buildings the sun glints off of....forget the hanging preposition! It is a city, where, especially in the rain, a flower like me, a 'Heather', must use her intuition to find her way down the maze of calles. Walking the city is like walking a labyrinth. It is healing. And the nectar, the amrit, or Amrita, is there, was there, all the time. It was always within me, even when I came home, and against my intuition, went back to work in the bars on the East Side. How I originally got there, with an aura full of whiteness from two decades living with Spirit, is a long story. People who could see auras then asked me what I was doing there. They said I was an angel, and I suppose I was, for a time, until it beat me down and tore me up...ripped my wings and aura to shreds.
But when it was the worst, I decided to fly to Venice to drown my sorrows, possibly to drown myself, and the vibration in that city first matched my sorrow to lure me in, and then she, Venice, sent me to listen to my heart in every church I entered, every place I sat down. That city is everything about learning to use your intuition, and the stories in this book by Jane Turner Rylands evoke memories, lovely and painful memories all wrapped into one, of a trip that healed lifetimes in an instant.
I taught me I could manifest things into my life just by thinking about them, writing about them. And I have a wish, something as a gift from Spirit if it will ever be meant to be: to go back to Venice someday, and ride in a gondola. I never did that. I would like to ride in a gondola with a Wise Man and a cat on Epiphany. A man wise enough to know that I will never be with him unless he both loves me and marries me. A man whom I also love. I have an idea who that man might be, but maybe my idea is different than God's. Who knows? I have an idea it may feel as if I were one half of the couple in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "Love In The Time of Cholera" riding down the river, but this river would be the Grand Canal. The great river, like the one in my poem I wrote so long ago, with new babies, souls, floating on lily pads, being pushed by women into the Canal of Life. That city was dirty and smelly, and pretty and beautiful at the same time...just like life. I dream of going back someday...
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