Water Colors

In Ladakh,

There is beauty

In the beautiful.

In the harsh.

In Ladakh,

Both are one,

At once.

I was so happy

When I saw

The mountains,

Or blue waters

Of Kiagar Tso,

I couldn't even cry

I was so sad.

In ladakh,

It is all one.

At once.

Let's say,

It is all very moving.

Difficult to wrap one's head around.

So take pictures. 

Say wow! Talk.

But in moments of silence,

Watch and be watched.

It is all so moving, that

It makes you still.

Both at once.

Similar things happen,

When I paint,

With Watercolors.

Eat.Pray.Love.

(Page 121) - It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that i first started mending my soul.  My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me up out of a police lineup. But I felt glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation.  You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being)  to find something beautiful within life, no  matter how slight.

I came to Italy pinched and thin.  I did not know yet what I deserved.  I still maybe don't fully know what I deserve.  But I do know that I have collected myself of late - through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures - into somebody much more intact.  The easiest, most fundamentally humans way to say it is that I have put on weight.  I exist more now than I did four months ago.  I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here.  And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world.  Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own.