On Goals, the “Gypsy” Women of Sicily, and Opening to Life

Looking back and ahead, but mostly ahead, because that is what you do this time of year

Hello from Sicily! New year, new country. And what an incredible beginning it has been. I’ll write more about Sicily in my next letter, which will update free and paid subscribers on my life in Siciliy, what I’m writing, and what I’m reading. For now, here some blood oranges from the market in Catania:

The New Year

A new year, like an extended journey, makes us consider where we have been and where we are going. I’m on month four of my travels. I have no specific endpoint in mind, no place, no specific identity I hope to arrive at. Where will my journey end up? Where am I headed? Who will I become? I don’t have a crystal ball. And as I wrote in my last letter, I’m leaning into that. But sometimes, especially now with the dawn of the new year, I think, shouldn’t I have a goal of some sort?

I’m currently coaching a writer who is working on a memoir of her two years of travels through Asia. In our attempts to create a shape for her narrative, I’m encouraging her to nail down what her goal was as she set out on her journey. What did she hope for? What was she looking for?

Usually when we travel, we’re just looking for a break from our normal life. Our goal is simply to relax or discover something new—travel as diversion, if you will. But the kind of journey she was on, and the kind I’m on as well, is about something larger. It’s like a reset, a time out, but also with the intention of finding something new—a new sense of self and/or a new life. So there is a goal of sorts, although we may not know exactly what that is when we set out. In my case, I am looking for what moves me, what fulfills me and brings me joy, and a place that makes me want to stay. How does one set a goal out of that?

Looking back ten years on her extended travels, the writer I’m working with still finds it hard to nail down what exactly her goal was. But a travel narrative, if not the journey itself, needs an intended goal, a desired outcome, something the protagonist wants. Just like in a novel, our characters’ deep desires are what drive the story. When we ourselves are the main character, though, gaining that kind of clarity is difficult.

I’ve thought a lot in the past about how people’s lives are translated onto the page—how lived experience becomes story in biography, memoir, autofiction, and biographical fiction. It all fascinates me. One of my favorite teaching experiences was a course called “Writing Lives.” We read books like Colm Toibin’s The Master, a novel about Henry James, and Jean Strouse’s acclaimed biography of Alice James, as well as Woolf’s Orlando, Janet Malcom’s The Silent Woman, Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, and many shorter pieces.

I also taught many times various courses on the theme of writing women’s lives. The last time I taught one, during the pandemic, I included a unit on travel (after we had done units on family, slavery, and motherhood). Historically, travel has been one of the most important ways in which new possibilities have opened up for women’s lives—and women’s stories. I was interested in exploring what women’s journeys looked like as they ventured beyond family and the domestic sphere, often on their own. One of the books we read may be the most popular women’s travel narrative ever written: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.

Gilbert set out with three very clear goals: to eat her way through Italy (in other words, to devote herself to pleasure), to pray in India (or to find inner peace), and to find a way to balance the two in Bali. Her original title may have been something like Eat, Pray, Balance. (She did, in fact, write a proposal for the book and get an advance to write it, before her trip, so it must have had a title.) But what she found in Bali was something far more conventional, according to my students, when she stumbled upon romance and love. Like so many of the stories told about women lives, it ended with her finding a man.

I have a lot of thoughts about this. I’ll share them at some point, but if I let myself go down that road now, I’ll never get back to the larger topic of goals and journey and new years’ taking stock and looking forward.

The Gypsy Women

On my second night in Catania, I was invited by Michelle, the host of the apartment where I’m staying, to attend a meeting of a group of women she has helped organize. It is called Zingarelle Sicilia—the gypsy women of Sicily. There were seven of us there, although they have connected 700 women across the island. They are women of all origins who now call Sicily home or one of their homes. As Michelle described them: women who don’t just have one home. Or perhaps women who reside somewhere outside of the traditional domestic arrangement. Either way, these women are living lives that their mothers and grandmothers didn’t have access to, Michelle pointed out to me. Most of them, like Michelle, have traveled extensively and/or moved around a lot.

As a newly minted gypsy woman myself, I was instantly drawn to these women. Michelle is originally from America but lived and traveled abroad in Asia, South America, and Australia before falling in love with a Sicilian and settling here. Two women are from London and had been living here for a about a year. Another is from Germany and has been living for the past three years in the south of France before moving here a few months ago. One was from Sicily but lived with her family in Spain while conducting her tour business here. And the last was also from Sicily and lived part-time here and part-time in Milan.

We met on January sixth, the Epiphany, which is a holiday here. Although I don’t think many people celebrate the many Catholic holidays in Italy by going to church, most stores and businesses were closed. One of the organizers of the meeting, who was unable to attend, had picked the day because she is originally from Ireland, and there the Epiphany is called Women’s Little Christmas. It’s a day for women to gather and celebrate while their menfolk stay at home and do the cooking and cleaning. I just love that—although it should happen more than once a year!

Epiphany for Catholics is also the last day of the Christmas season, when the trees and decorations come down and a new year begins. As part of the event, the woman from Ireland had picked a poem, “For a New Beginning” from John O’Donahue, whom I love, particularly his book Anam Cara. We listened to a recording of her reading the poem in her lovely, lilting Irish accent, which made it all the more moving. Every line of the poem spoke to me, and I felt in that moment as if perhaps I had come all the way to Sicily just to hear it.

For a New Beginning
by John O’Donahue

In out of the way places of the heart
Where your thoughts never think to wander
This beginning has been quietly forming
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

This poem reminded me that I am not merely in limbo or in the messy, uncomfortable “neutral zone” of transition, as I described in my last letter. I am instead at a new beginning. For so long, I felt the emptiness growing inside of me but could not leave what I had outgrown. The seduction of safety held me until my courage kindle (although I tend to see it more as reaching such a low point that I had to save myself). Last year, I stepped out onto new ground, and I’ve often felt like I did as a teenager or young adult, with no clear destination.

Where this poem ends up intrigues me: the new beginning your soul yearns for will lead you to a new home. As O’Donahue describes it, what awaits you is “home in a new rhythm.” Is that my goal, a new home, a new rhythm? Something in me says yes, you cannot travel forever. You need a home, a nest, a haven, a world all your own, where your days and seasons have a rhythm. It is hard to have a steady rhythm on the road, living in other people’s apartments or in lodgings designed for transient living. So I wonder, how will I find this new home? Trust the promise of the opening in front of you, O’Donahue says. Step into the void, he seems to be telling me, and let the future unfurl.

On Not Making Plans

Five days ago, I arrived in Catania, Sicily, on a flight from Rome, originating in Nice, knowing next to nothing about this island. All I knew was that it was (and still is, I’ve learned) a hotbed of the mafia and that it has an active volcano towering over it, Mount Etna.

I also speak no Italian and am nervous to try to cram a new language in my head after trying to learn French the past couple of years and finding German still popping into my head every time I open my mouth to speak it.

You may wonder, what has possessed me, then, to book an entire month in Catania? I came here for Cummari, which seemed like a special place to me, and so it has already turned out to be. It’s an unusual accommodation, the only one like it I’ve found in Europe. It’s a coliving/coworking space for female digital nomads, writers, artists, and travelers. Booking is by the month. There is space for three women to stay at a time, and I’m the first guest of the new year. I’ve had the place to myself so far, but more women will come on Jan. 11 and Jan. 20. (To learn what’s behind that lovely name Cummari, you can read this piece on female friendships.)

Having no plans for my month in Sicily, and very little knowledge of what I would find when I got there, is not my usual MO. As I said in my last letter, I’m a planner. The summers my daughter and I spent in Europe when I was teaching study abroad were full of itineraries. I spent hours, days, weeks, months, finding the best places to stay, the cheapest and most convenient modes of transportation, and the most interesting activities. I made reservations for exhibits. I bought advance tickets to sights so we could skip the long line. I left very little to chance.

What has come over me? Basically, I’ve gotten tired of planning. The internet has made it very easy to preplan every detail of your travels. But I yearn to be the intrepid, if sometimes anxious, backpacker that I was when I was 22.

Back in those archaic times (1992), we had guidebooks and the telephone. That was it. My friend and I spent three months or so backpacking around Europe. We stayed in youth hostels with no prior reservations or plans of how long we would stay. We also stayed in private apartments, which were impossible to book ahead.

I remember arriving in Budapest, with no idea of where my friend and I would spend the night. At the train station, people with rooms to let waited to meet arriving travelers. Our only plan was to find a female host. Hosts had to be registered with the tourist office, so there was some kind of guarantee that we wouldn’t be swindled or worse. We picked an old lady who ushered us via public transportation out to a Soviet-era apartment block. It was terribly depressing. But we had a comfortable room in which to sleep and a hearty breakfast in the morning. My most vivid memory, though, is of leaving behind my favorite jacket in the armoire. I mourned its loss the rest of the trip.

Just the other day I finally booked a place to stay in Berlin beginning the third week of March, two and a half months away. I had done a little research before and bookmarked a list of apartments, only one of which was still available. I requested to book it, and while I waited for an answer, I looked around to see what else I might be able to find. I quickly began to despair. There was nothing but shared rooms or very expensive apartments left in that part of Berlin. I feared I had wait too long. I got lucky, though, and was able to book the one I had requested, a nice apartment with a balcony for a reasonable price in a good neighborhood. Given the housing crunch in Berlin these days, particularly with the influx of Ukranian refugees, I would say I got very lucky.

I find myself being pulled in two directions. On one side, I want to plan ahead and not fly by the seat of my pants, which would surely leave me staying in dingy hotels when I could have had a comfortable apartment with a balcony and a view. On the other side, I want to take life as it comes, to embrace new possibilities and pursue new interests. Right now, if I could follow my desires, I would be booking places in Italy for the next couple of months. But I can’t. I have a non-refundable rental in Scotland waiting for me in February. Plus, my tourist visa for the EU (or more precisely the Schengen Zone) is about to run out. I can’t exactly go where the wind takes me.

Nonetheless, I would like to step into the void as much as possible and let the future unfurl before me.

On Opening

Some people like to choose a word to guide them as the new year begins. I’ve done it before but never remembered my word for more than a month or two. This year, I had a word that I had already been thinking a lot about: openness, the state of being open. But when I read O’Donahue’s poem about a new beginning as an opening, I decided the word opening provided even more possibilities.

My intention is to remain open to possibility (without over-planning) and also to have faith in the promise of the opening in front of me. To those two concepts I would also add a more personal kind of opening that I’ve been feeling. It’s about opening to the world around me and to the people that I meet.

We don’t see so much of the world around us because we spend so much of our lives looking down. We stare at our phones, tablets, or books when we’re on public transportation. We watch a map on our phones to see where we are going. When we walk, we look down at the ground in front of us, avoiding eye contact with those passing by. And we’ve all seen the young people or even whole families sitting around a table in a restaurant looking at their phones instead of at each other.

Looking away from the people and the world around us closes us off from possibility, experience, and connectedness. I want to look up as much as I can and be open to what I find there. If I’m looking up, I may stumble, I realize (although the only time I’ve fallen on this trip was when I was staring down at the map on my phone). But I’ve come to believe that so much of living and happiness boils down to whether we are open or closed to it. How much of life can we let in? Are we turning toward it or away from it? Is our heart open to others, or have we closed it out of fear or judgment?

Children are wide open until they are conditioned not to be. They learn to protect themselves from pain by shutting their doors. They learn that to be open is to be vulnerable. I certainly learned this. By the time I was twenty, I had built up a veritable fortress around me. I was very careful who and what I let in. I was more afraid of the negative consequences of being open than those of being closed.

Before I could start to transform my life, I had to start tearing down my walls. I had become a prisoner inside of them, yearning for connectedness but cut off from myself and most of those around me. The process of opening, little by little, has been long and painful, because you have to open up to yourself first. But I already feel so much lighter, even though I’m still working on dismantling those fortress walls.

The openness I’m talking about cultivating is a fundamental curiosity, one that does not seek a predetermined goal or need to have its preconceptions confirmed. It’s about turning away from distractions and really seeing and listening to whatever presents itself. It’s also about opening up emotionally, allowing the feelings to rise and fall again, as they naturally do, rather than closing them off and refusing to acknowledge them.

I was talking to a lovely person I’ve met in here in Catania about how I don’t know where my journey will take me, or where I hope it ends up. He leaned back in his chair and said simply, “You are open.” He held his hands together, and bowed his head slightly, as if to salute me, and I felt another stone come tumbling down.

I should have perhaps responded that I am opening, rather than being already fully open. The prefer the word opening because it connotes a process rather than a static state of being. We could also think of it as a practice and, really, a form of mindfulness. Meditation is, in fact, what has helped me bring my walls down and open up to possibility. In one of my future letters, I can write more about that, if people are interested. But in the meantime, I can wholeheartedly recommend the work of Tara Brach, who has been incredibly helpful to me. She has a talk called “The ‘Exquisite Risk: An Undefended Heart,” as well as a whole series of meditations related to open awareness. Basically, anything you find on her site is pure gold.

I’d love to hear your New Year goals or if you have chosen a word of the year and why. Feel free to pop those in the comment section below or send me an email. And definitely let me know if you have other thoughts or questions. I always enjoy hearing from you!!

Here’s wishing you a fabulous 2023!

All the best,

Anne