writing | Lines of Wonder

Last night, I held a poetry reading in my home.

There were five of us gathered in my living room, connected by more than thirty years of friendship and a shared willingness to be present with one another.

I had a feeling that if this evening was going to invite anyone to open up, it would need to be just us. No larger audience. No strangers. No need to explain ourselves or perform for anyone outside the circle.

What I didn’t know was that one of us didn’t even like poetry.

And yet, as the evening unfolded, the poems began to find their way in.

Katharine’s words, read aloud, were like an incantation. They awakened memories, evoking people and places, losses and longings, moments from the past we perhaps hadn’t realized we were still carrying. They opened small doors.

They brought with them feelings of guilt and shame, joy and sorrow. And yet, at the end of each poem, there was a feeling of satisfaction—a sense that something had been revealed, acknowledged, and allowed to rest.

The words offered a kind of permission, gently allowing us to let down the façade we spend so much of our lives constructing and maintaining. They slipped beneath the familiar roles and identities—the selves we present to one another and to the world—and touched something more tender. They gave us space to simply be.

They were also a balm.

There was something in hearing another human being name an experience—especially one we might have thought was ours alone—that soothed old wounds. The poems allowed us to acknowledge the complicated things. To feel without immediately having to explain. And perhaps, most importantly, they reminded us that we are not alone.

Maybe that is what poetry can do at its best.

It does not always need to be understood in an intellectual sense. Sometimes we don’t need to like poetry before it can move us. Sometimes we simply need to hear a few words that find the place in us where something has been waiting—quietly, patiently—to be recognized.

Last night, in a small room filled with women who have shared more than three decades of friendship, poetry became a key.

And for a little while, we opened.

Travel changes as we get older, and, I hope, wiser. This trip, I realized that travel is not about how much ground you cover, but how deeply you allow a place to settle into you.

I have never been one to plan every detail of a trip, but there were times when seeing the famous museums, cathedrals, ruins, and viewpoints felt essential. There was an unspoken belief that the more I saw, the more successful the journey would be.

And perhaps that was exactly right for that season of life.

Time felt limitless. We raced toward experience, eager to collect memories, certain there would always be another chance to return.

This trip hit differently.

The moments I remember most from our Italian getaway are not the ones that appear in guidebooks.

They are the quiet ones.

Ordering espresso in the morning, in Italian, and lingering at the bar while the city slowly wakes. Watching laundry billow and sway between buildings. Listening to conversations I cannot understand from a balcony above. Walking the same streets over and over, beginning to recognize familiar corners, favourite cafés, and shortcuts home.

There is a subtle shift that happens when you stop trying to see everything.

A city stops being a destination and starts becoming a place. And it breathes.

You notice the rhythms of daily life. The way shopkeepers greet one another. The hour when the streets grow quiet in the afternoon heat. The ritual of evening walks as couples and families emerge into the piazzas or stroll along the waterfront at sunset.

You begin to feel like a part of the place.

I am discovering that slowing down requires a certain trust — trust that what matters will reveal itself without being chased. That beauty doesn’t always announce itself through something grand. Sometimes it arrives in a conversation, a meal, the hands of an artisan at work, or the way the light falls across an old stone building at the end of the day.

Travel is about discovery.

And for me, discovery is about how I experience a place.

I am less interested in checking boxes than in paying attention.

And perhaps that is one of the great gifts of this season of life: allowing ourselves to slow down long enough to notice the quiet moments, and discovering that they are often the ones that stay with us the longest.