Reading the landscape

I’m in Sicily this week so all I’m reading is the layered landscape of the wind-blown island, the tissue of patched civilizations, the history of the land that can be read like a tragic palimpsest, full of erasures and additions, corrections and emendations, the decadence of time rushing to its own fulfillment.

Every rock is a piece of parchment, every pine tree a quill tracing intelligibility through the air. There is no right way to read, but it all makes sense. It makes sense because the island is life itself, messy and glorious.

There are very few other places in the world where the past is as stratographically visible as it is in Sicily, where each piece of land reveals its biography like tree growth rings, vulnerable, but inexorably resilient and ultimately undefeated.

Some of the first words ever written were inscribed in stone. But the most enduring ones are written in the landscape, etched on the skin of the earth, the proud scars of continuity & emotion, throbbing with life.