Roots and Dreams
As I flew home this past weekend from Italy I finished the book Roots and Sky by Christie Purifoy. It’s written in seasons and I’d saved the final summer season for just that moment. I paused as I read this passage: “Why does scripture echo with the twin commands to return and remember? It is because God’s promises always interact with places. We relate to God and to one another in some place. To remember is to return. To return is to remember.” Our dreams that become a prayer, she writes, return us, yet, “the thing that never fails to startle me, to wake me up, is that even the prayers themselves are given.”
Once upon a time a dream was awoken in me. This dream became a prayer: Show me a way, a path to stretch outside the boundaries of my small place. Could I adventure to see the world and somehow offer what I teach into the lives of people I may not live near? The dream prayer was filled with memory—travel sewn into my DNA by ancestral longings, by my parents determined curiosity and desire to show my brothers and me something beyond our backyard. And by my ancestors desire to return, to carry their homeland with them into backyard rosemary bushes and tomato plants, into their kitchen they filled with simmering sauces and meats, cured salami and prosciutto, cheeses with names that sing: Pecorino, Reggiano.
My grandmother’s hands rolled dough for long strands of pasta, made giant pots of sauces and soups. When she died too young, her kitchen echoed with the melody of Italy. My grandfather entered that space, learned the song himself, kept the rich fragrance alive so that when I return, it’s his sauces and wine, the tables he set that I remember best of all. These were the tastes I dreamed of, roots that pulled me toward ancient soil.
The prayer in me has become the leaves of a deeply rooted tree, leaves reaching upward toward the sky, changing with season and time. The memory of travel and of food returns me—I remember the longing and live into the strange discovery of the opportunity to arrive again in the land of living my life. The gift of teaching, the pull toward quiet receptivity, the longing to be close to earth, longings to taste and smell, to adventure, returns me to myself. All of it beckoned like shining sunlight dancing over water, sparkling with both a larger and smaller promise of life itself.
I found that this promise was not something new, it was something given and remembered, part of the root system within me that continues to call out, return, remember. Return to place, to an old but living story.
It’s the sensory feast that reminds me now of the lived dream. Remembering the sounds of birds singing through the morning, their songs filling the yoga room’s open windows, and the hawk and owl calling in metric rhythmic at night. The sounds of laughter echoing and ringing like a chapel bell from meal tables and buses; a chorus of Italian women chattering in the kitchen and old men around a cafe table. The stories shared by new friends telling of their memories of food and of “Heart and Soul” being played together on a piano.
The smells of tomatoes and meat stewing into sauce wafting into the yoga room and of jasmine hanging from walls and buildings. Smells of bay leaves and sweet peaches and cantaloupe, of wine and truffles, dewy French roses in the morning sun, lavender and rosemary rubbed through my fingers.
And, oh, the tastes! Of sweet cherries and mulberries picked from a small orchard of trees dangling with bright fruits, homemade pasta cooked with buttery, soft porcini mushrooms, and of the salty sweet richness of handmade hazelnut and pistachio gelati. Tastes of creamy cappuccinos and bitter espresso, of simple vegetable soups and creamy chocolate lava cake. The spicy creaminess of the pasta of Rome—Cacio e Pepe (cheese and pepper) and orange fizziness of the signature drink, Aperol Spritz; of crispy focaccia and lightly grilled vegetables spiced with Calabrian peppers.
Between each town and city, the sight of so much shining, open, undeveloped land filled with flowers, trees, hay bales, and animals. Castles and walls built on high hills, architectures thousands of years old, long tables filled with smiling faces. The sight of new friends making pasta together, drinking wine; of seagulls and fruit stands and vendor stalls filled with brightly colored vegetables, seafood, cheeses and olive oil, the largest lemons in the world.
And touch—of rubbing balm onto each yoga practitioner to soothe their necks and backs, refreshingly cold pool water with the bright sun overhead, sweetly crisp night air. The feel of cool, soft grass under foot and the hardness of a bench to rest on in a field of trees and flowers. The embrace of friends, of my husband, my teens.
All of it, roots remembered, memories come back to, dreams opening up into the present and the future.
“Make it your ambition to live a quiet life,” Purifoy reminds me. Testament words. I remember and forget to live this over and again. Yet, these are the roots returned to in me. “Quietness,” Purifoy writes, “is a receptive emptiness. Only the meek will inherit the earth because only the meek have room within themselves to receive such a wide and wild inheritance.”
This retreat adventure reminded me of who I already am, of a life I am rooted into and can return to. It showed me the way that land can be loved and the way that humans can partner in creation with one another and with God. It showed me a way of living in a culture of tending, not throwing away—for architecture, land, food, and people. It reminded me that mealtime is, as the Italians told me, the most important time of the day, and that family is the community of people who you can share laughter and food and story with.
This precious time reminded me of the roots that have branching systems going back through long ancestral lines. It reminded me of quiet receptivity, of allowing time to be still, and it filled me with the sensory sweetness of the land of the living. So much rich, sparkling delight in the real and everyday. It reminded me and it awoke in me a host of dreams, the remembrance of a prayer that hovers between the earth and sky, like a canopy of brightly shimmering leaves that rustle and blow, change shape and color, give shade and life, and resemble the whole root system under rich soil below.
An Italian cousin told me that Italians don't understand the concept of American "vacation." He said that they see Americans work so hard in their daily lives, just to get somewhere else. That "somewhere else" of vacation, he said, is then expected to deliver something greater than our daily life. He said Italians live each day to see the possibility for richness, joy, and delight and to incorporate rest, Il Dolce Far Niente (the sweetness of doing nothing), into every day. And that when they take a trip to see other places, they don't expect more or less than what their everyday can also offer. What a reminder to me. There is joy and challenge in the whole of life, and I can incorporate retreat into my life no matter where I am. So, in honor of the summer season, of travel, and of delight in seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary every day, these themes will inform my upcoming summer retreat posts for now. May we learn to live not to seize the day, but to see the day. This, dear friends, is how we may live into prayers and dreams the reality of a daily life that matters.
Join my co-teacher Jen and I for our next retreat, September 2025, in Lagos, Portugal on the Algarve Coast. Learn more and sign up here: Portugal with Christa Mastrangelo Joyce