How Paying Attention Enriched My Underst

How Paying Attention Enriched My Understanding of the Natural World.



Bikerider





I had never been to Italy before and I was unaware of its glowing beauty. My father was the first to come to America and he rarely talked about what it was like in Italy or why he left. I knew I had an aunt living there but she had no desire to come to America, an attitude I didn’t understand. He said little else about my Italian ancestors. I was born and raised in America and had only traveled when I was in the Army. The vastness of America was something I took for granted. So was the way American’s lived. We are a noisy, boisterous bunch, that’s for sure. When I heard criticism of America I easily found reasons to defend her. I could not believe anyone would want a different way of life than the one America provided. I was not a “flag waver” that thought America could do no wrong. I just took it for granted that we had the best way of life and didn’t understand why anyone would not want to join us.



In 2007 I took a trip to Italy. I met my Aunt and her five children. I saw the lovely bed and breakfast my Aunt and Cousin run. I watched my 72 year old aunt tend to her 5 cows everyday, twice a day. One evening I walked through the church cemetery and noticed how many of the headstones were for people who had lived a hundred years or more. The math was easy, understanding it all still took time. During my three weeks in Italy I saw elderly people tend their farms by hand. It was back breaking work but they were there, working, everyday. When I spoke to the village inhabitants they always had a smile, a minute to talk, and a small glass of wine to share. I learned how most of the food I ate, the cheese, the sausage, the cornmeal, virtually everything, had been made right there, in this small ancient village, a place where hardworking busy people seemed always happy to see me. When I went to the national park I saw that people parked their small cars at the bottom of the road and walked to the top of the mountain. It was quite a hike, especially for the elderly walkers. On the steeper mountains it seemed the bikers far outnumbered cars making their way to the top. A fact that was not lost on me.



The beauty of the land was something else that had an impact on me. The region of Italy where I lived for three weeks is one of the most beautiful places on earth. My Aunt’s village is halfway up the side of a mountain. Everyday that I looked through the valley, I could hear the river below me rushing its clean cool water to a large sparkling lake that shimmered in the sunlight. The churches in this valley are ancient and respected. The church in the quaint village where my Aunt lives was built in the late 1600’s. The interior of the church appears to be new. And I noticed that in each village that dotted the sides of the valley, the tallest structure was the church steeple. The villages were spotless and crime is unheard of. The vineyards, orchards and gardens cover the steep hillsides and appear to be held in place by equal distanced fence posts. It was a wondrous sight to see the people, the farming, the rivers and lakes all living with each other. There was an unmistakable reverence that the people held for all the inhabitants of nature, and all the pieces seemed openly connected and an unspoken harmony was present.



The Italian people I met lived simple but happy lives. Their biggest fear was that their way of life would come to an end because of the actions of others and the land that seemed to live within them would be destroyed, and they would be powerless to stop it. They feared others not as individuals but as countries. They feared that a war between countries could take away all the beauty that surrounded them. They did not refer to Americans as the problem, but rather America. Their attitude was the same with China, Russia and Mexico. It was not the peoples but rather the countries and their governments. They feared that the pollution caused by a country, or many countries, would have a devastating impact on the land that they held with such affinity. Their fear of armies and wars of other countries had these hard working people in fear that their way of life would end because of foreign disagreements. As I stood on a narrow dirt road that had been carved into the side of a mountain, a road my ancestors walked for centuries, I came to realize that what keeps people here is their roots and their love of the land. Looking out onto this valley my aunt see’s her ancestors, the land they worked and then left to her and she see’s her very life.

I stood watching this beautiful place and its people toiling in their gardens and understood their happiness. They did not try to dominate nature, the learned to live with it. And through that respect for nature they learned they could have what they wanted because what they wanted was only to have what they needed.



Write a STORY or POEM about a time when paying attention enriched your understanding of a relationship, an event, or the natural world.





WC/937