One last lap around the quail.

I think about spending my last day in Italy on some Cascais-style adventure, a dramatic farewell daytrip to Palermo or Modena, but decide against it. Sicily has taught me the beauty that lies not just in breadth but in depth, and so it feels right to say goodbye by circling the island one last time, stopping to see my friends and sit by the water for a bit. 

In front of the tourist office I run into Frank, who’s as excited as ever to see me. “Ongela, Ongela!” he calls out, and we kiss cheeks and stand right in the center of the street with Vespas rumbling by on each side. Without Laura around to translate, we can’t get past more than simple greetings, but that doesn’t stop Francessco. He tells me something of seemingly great import, shaking his hands in the air like only an Italian can.

“I don’t understand you, Frank,” I tell him, smiling, but he goes on.

“No parlo Italiano, remember?” I say again, laughing now, to which he nods and continues his story. I listen to him, not understanding a word, but riveted nonetheless.

Nothing makes sense and it doesn’t matter, wasn’t that the lesson Sicily taught me on that first night? Turn off your searching, analytical brain. You won’t need it here. Relax a little. Let go of your sad story. Dive into the world with your heart open wide. Good things will happen.

And they did, of course. I finally calmed down a little over this calling business, knowing that my life is just a slip of torn paper on the trash heap of time. I made decent progress toward letting go of my longing. It’s still here, of course, but it hasn’t ruined a nice walk in weeks. I began to actually enjoy writing, and then enjoyment grew into…something…at the writing desk last week when I came home from Noto.  So what is that something, the strange feeling that I occasionally hit upon when I’m writing these days? I’ve had a few more encounters with it since that first afternoon, writing about the pizza, and of course I’ve done plenty of ruminating as I’ve looped the island on my walks. I haven’t been able to pin down any real specifics, but I’ve got a theory, and it starts with this clue: the feeling is similar to one I read about a few years ago, when I briefly gave up looking for a calling and decided to hunt down God instead.

       You might remember that it started when I’d read all those dreamy stories about the mystics, people who actually went belly to belly with God. There was Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk turned Hindu ascetic. He’d been strolling through a garden in England when suddenly everything around him was sparkling and perfect, and the sky became “but a veil before the face of God.” There was a woman named Marabai Devi, who was riding a train across the countryside when she was instantly flooded with a euphoria so electric that she looked out the window, saw a field of cabbages and straight up fell in love with them. She fell in love with cabbages! Can you blame me for wanting a little of that? I set aside my search for a calling, took up meditation and all sorts of spiritual pursuits, and ultimately came up empty handed.

       Until just recently of course.

Now, look, whatever it is I’m encountering at the kitchen table lately isn’t the bliss of the mystics. There’s no ecstasy. I’m not in love with any cabbages and I’ve yet to be thrown onto a cloud in a spiritual orgasm while an angel drives a spear into my heart. But it’s certainly bigger than the okayness that writing gave me in Lisbon, and it’s more than the simple enjoyment I encountered early on in Italy. I guess I’d say it feels like a hint of mystical euphoria. It’s Bliss Light.

It’s awfully strange to me that, after a pretty strict regimen of meditation spiritual searching, it’s writing that’s giving me the little bits of God that I’d wanted so badly. A few days ago, I decided I had to see if I could figure out why, and because I’m a woman on a tiny island with no English bookstore, I took my search to the internet. It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon the work of a very smart lady named Evelyn Underhill, who served up a teacup full of answers in a sweet British accent.

Ms. Underhill was writing in the early 20th Century, just before England entered World War One, and her approach to spiritual matters is practical and precise. She defines mysticism as “the art of union with Reality,” and explains it using a metaphor that makes an awful lot of sense to me. The world, she says, is literally teeming with heaven. God is right here on earth. And if we could experience things directly—as they really are—we’d know that, but we humans have a problem. We can’t handle the God.

  All of that boundless magic and mystery are just too much for us, and so we’ve decided to categorize everything into neat little boxes. We put the sea into one box and stick a label on it. We put lemon pie into another box and give it another label. And on and on we go, sticking things into plexiglass boxes and printing off a label for each one: here’s kissing, here’s a fight with your mother, here’s a fluffy towel, here’s the smell of the rain on asphalt. And at the end of the day, we sit in the center of a cold museum and stare at things through their plexiglass cages, able to sense only a tiny percentage of their smells and tastes and sensations. “Welp, this is life,” we think. “Kind of a snooze.”

The mystics are different, though. Evelyn Underhill says that they’ve had their plexiglass boxes smashed open. Whether it’s because of years of meditation and prayer or just dumb luck, Reality comes rushing at them in all its glory. They get to know firsthand all of that God that lies in the world, the magic and the euphoria and the straight up bliss that the rest of us never know. In Underhill’s words, they get a peek at “another, lovelier world, tinted with unimaginable wonders, alive with ultimate music.” Lucky bastards, right?

Well, Ms. Underhill agreed, and she wasn’t so interested in the kind of mystical experiences that descend upon a few fortunate souls here and there. She wanted to teach everyone to break open the plexiglass and drink up God in all of its magnificence, and so, in her very matter-of-fact way, she set about teaching us how to do this. And would you like to know who she held up as examples again and again? Writers. Writers, according to Ms. Underhill, are the perfect model for breaking through the plexiglass and getting to God. Writers are the teacher’s pets.

What’s the writer doing that most people aren’t? Nothing fancy, and nothing that every human can’t do. A writer simply observes a thing so intently that he begins to scratch away at the plexiglass box, poking and prodding until he finally makes a hole. To know a thing well enough to really do it justice, a writer has to dive right into the center of it. “He always wants to press deeper and deeper,” Ms. Underhill writes, “to let the span of his perception spread wider and wider.”

And that’s it! That’s what I’m feeling lately as I write. It’s a feeling of digging down to the center of a thing—a slice of pizza or a fat Baroque cherub—until I feel as though I’m not just observing them but in them, bumping up against their perfect little molecules. And then I go a little deeper, down to the spinning atoms, then down to the spaces between the atoms and that’s when I find it: not nothingness but that little spark of…well, something. I still don’t quite know what to call it, but I suspect Ms. Underhill might shrug her shoulders and say it straight: “That’s God, dear. What else could it be?”

I hate to be greedy, but I really hope those little bits of euphoria expand. I’m awfully happy with Bliss Light, but man, I wouldn’t mind the real thing. In my dreamier moments, shuffling over the stony sidewalks here in Sicily, I imagine myself becoming a channel for something holy that will pour onto the page and fill it with luminous prose. I imagine reaching the full out ecstasy that Bede Griffins and St. Theresa knew. Long after I’ve given up hope of ever falling for a cabbage, do I still have a chance at love? Time will tell, but one thing is certain: it won’t happen in Italy. My time here is nearly up.

I keep walking, and when Marco’s café comes into sight, I’m relieved to see that he’s behind the counter.  He grabs me an arrancini from the case and rings up my soda, and I pull out my euros and tell him that I’m leaving in the morning. His frowns for a moment, then leans across the glass counter. “And to where are you going, Angela?” he asks me.

“Greece,” I tell him.

It’s true. When I left for Europe two months ago, I had a vague idea that I might like to make Greece one of my stops, and then all of that carousing with Sappho and Arethusa here in Italy sealed the deal. Friends who’ve been to Greece tell me that Athens isn’t a place you want to linger, that it’s really just a stopover en route to the islands. But I found a nice, cheapish apartment there, and more than that, the city just feels right. In any case, the place is booked and the plane ticket is purchased, and I’m equal parts excited and sad to be leaving Italy and heading to Greece.

“Where, Angela?” Marco asks me, his forehead wrinkling. He doesn’t recognize the English word “Greece” and I don’t know the Italian name for it, so I pull a little cocktail napkin from a stack on the bar and fumble in my bag for a pen. Outside, the sun is gone from the sky and the night is tiptoeing down the alley and into the café. Marco and I huddle together over the little napkin and I draw the world’s worst rendering of the Mediterranean coast. There’s the boot, then the wobbly little hacky sack of Sicily, and to the east, a sprawling land mass that looks like a dozen greedy arms grabbing for the sea. Rand McNalley won’t be calling with a job, but Marco’s face lights up in recognition.

“Ah,” he says to me, “Grecia.” In Italian, the word is soft and open, like an upturned palm. “Gray-sha.”

“Yes, Gray-sha!” I say, happy that we understand one another. And also, happy to be going to a place that sounds so beautiful and happy. “Gray-sha!”

Marco tucks my napkin map into his shirt pocket and winks at me, then we say goodbye.

It’s just a few steps to the Fontane to see my old friend Arethusa, the only nymph I’ll likely ever have for a neighbor. I lean over the railing to watch the ducks slide over her. “I’m going to your homeland, Arethusa,” I think.

The questions I’ll bring to Greece with me are piling up inside my head. There’s the one about whether or not writing could deliver a mystical experience, of course. But that’s only a bonus question, really, mostly for fun. The big one is this: how do I complete the second half of Frederick Buechner’s equation?

Remember his definition, the one I mulled over that sad night in Lisbon? A vocation, he said, is where your deep joy and the world’s deep need overlap. Miraculously, unexpectedly, I think I’m ready to declare that writing just might be my deep joy. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done, and it’s not the quick burst of fun that the self-help writers prodded me to find. But here in Italy, I’ve finally found those tiny bits of rapture and deep joy that I’ve always wanted so badly. They’ve convinced me that I’m onto something.

Deep joy is only half of the equation, though, and I can’t yet imagine how my writing could meet any deep need. All of this self-discovery and expansion have been wonderful for me, but how could they possibly serve the world? I have no idea, but those are questions for Greece, so I gather my questions into a loose knot and toss them out over the sea, reversing Arethusa’s path. “I’ll see you soon,” I call out to them, and return my attention to the Fontane for tonight.

And, oh, I’ve nearly forgotten! There’s a second version of Arethusa’s story, an alternate ending of sorts that I’ve been meaning to share. We know the story of how the poor nymph lives here in Sicily while Alpheus is still out hunting. But a myth, I’ve learned, is a fluid thing. Free from the copyright notices we slap on our modern stories, ancient audiences were welcome to change a myth to suit their needs. A few days ago, I came upon a version of the Arethusa myth recorded by a poet named Nonnus, and it couldn’t be more perfect.

In Nonnus’ story, Alpheus was still a hunter who fell madly in love with the nymph swimming in his river. But this time, when Arethusa saw Alpheus rise from the water to speak with her, she fell in love, too. She wanted him just as badly as he wanted her, and the two of them began a love story for the ages.

 But one day, while she wandered in the forest, she got lost. She found herself falling deep into the earth, down under the sea where she wandered in darkness before she finally rose here in Siracusa. Alfie, of course, was devastated to be apart from the woman he loved most, and he wanted her back more than anything. He hunted for his lost love over all of Greece, rising up over rocky mountains and down along the valley bottoms, all the while calling her name. At the edge of the world, he threw himself down into the dirt, desperate and exhausted and utterly devoid of hope. And then, miraculously, he knew what to do.

“I don’t need to long for Arethusa,” Alfie whispered to himself, his heart growing warm with hope. “I need to become like her. Then we’ll never be separate again.”

And so he did just that. He let his own body melt into a stream. He fell down into the sea and traveled straight through it, flying toward Siracusa as fast as he could go. His intent was so strong and his love was so great that even though he flowed through the salty ocean, his waters stayed fresh and pure. And here in Siracusa, he found Arethusa and he fell right into her, his waters and hers blending together. Desire was entirely unnecessary, then, because the hunter and the hunted were one and the same, and they’ve bubbled here together ever since.

So all of this time, when I thought I was sitting next to Arethusa, I’ve been in the company of Alpheus too. He was here all along, the faithful hunter who got what he wanted most by falling right into the world.

It’s getting late and I have bags still to pack, so I lean over the railing of the Fontane and toss down two farewell kisses, one each for Arethusa and Alpheus, then shuffle toward home.