Venice is my Value
La Serenissima generously gives me something essential I live for...
Venice. Veneza. La Serenissima.
When I first visited Venice almost a decade ago, I fell in love with it. It had always captured my imagination, yet despite being in Europe on many occasions, I had never visited. As I wandered through its narrow street, crossed its canals, and gazed upon its magnificent palacios, I had a sense of regret then that I had not come sooner, that I had waited so long.
But as its richness and beauty seeped into me and touched a deep vein, I realized that most of my life experience had been a preparation for this encounter. I could appreciate and absorb its beauty in a way my younger self could not.
It was like a fine wine waiting for a more refined palate to discover it.
In a way, it wasn’t my first encounter. The Passion a book by Jeanette Winterson (who also writes on Substack) was the first. In it, a boatman with webbed feet walks on water, and a passionately beating heart is sequestered away in a box in a resplendent home. And like me, she too had never visited Venice when she spun her magical tale.
And so, even though the streets were packed with tourists, I was unbothered. I floated through the city as if in a dream, tears in my eyes as I turned each corner to discover a building or statue more beautiful than the one before.
I saw the canals where boatmen walked on water, and the steep homes lining the canal stole my heart; magical moments and all sorts of synchronicities abounded.
Returning last week after almost a decade was no different. I walked out of the train station straight into a picture postcard view from a bridge where I, and others, all stopped, enthralled with the beautiful vista.
I was caught in an eternal moment, the past on the side I had just left, the future to be crossed into.
A core value is something so essential to have in your life that without it you feel unfulfilled; having it inspires an unfolding of your true nature that embeds you fully in aliveness. One of mine is (Discovering) Beauty Everywhere.
When I moved to Washington, DC, in 1990, I chanced upon a memorial to Kahlil Gibran on Massachusetts Avenue inscribed with some of his best-loved quotes. This one captured my imagination :
“We live only to discover beauty.,
All else is a form of waiting”
I’ve pondered this quote ever since and have found that beauty is to be discovered when we see things with both a directed awareness and openness. To discover beauty takes patience. Its bedfellows are imagination, wonder, and optimism. It means pausing to reflect on the beauty surrounding us, sometimes in small hidden ways, at other times in seemingly ugly moments or places (for what is beauty without contrast?), but always being attuned to its presence.
In traveling to Venice last week, at what was a busy time for me, I would not have gone had I been more reasoned about it. But it was the best choice I could have made. I discovered beauty everywhere! I was buoyed, revived, enriched, and uplifted in my time there.
It was not perfect, but I’ve long let go of perfection. Instead, as I honored this value of (Discovering) Beauty Everywhere, there was an unwinding, a slowing down as the knot was loosened. I breathed. I breathed in all the beauty with my eyes. It was the pause on the bridge in the eternal moment while the sleek gondoliers passed below, slicing through the opalescent water washing over time itself.
When a value is honored and lived, it keeps us connected to our true authentic nature, our inherent goodness, a sense that despite all our contradictions we know something of ourselves. Living a value had a quiet ring of internal truth that only we can hear.
We must be the first to honor our values because if we don’t, then we will allow others to step on and dishonor them. And this is unkind, not just to ourselves but to the world, because our best self and service emerge when our values are honored and lived every day in some way.
In this case, I honored my value and lived by taking a trip that reason might have crossed off the list.
I am grateful for this city sinking ever so slowly into the sea. To say Venice is my value is simply shorthand, an encapsulation of everything I’m speaking of here that is important to me and need not matter to anyone else.
Core values come from deep within. They require no external explanation or validation.
Are you honoring yours?