Posts Tagged ‘window’

What the Window Frames

Thursday, May 15th, 2014

Some of my favorite things about my apartment in Rome are the windows that open wide to look down on the bustling street of Cola di Rienzo below. Windows, shuttered, unshuttered, glass or iron grated, dominate the facades of most buildings in Rome. Tourists photograph them, sometimes not even knowing why. I count myself among this lot. Windows in Italy in general are beautiful, and there is something magical about them in an ineffable way. I feel compelled to take pictures of beautiful windows in the same way I feel compelled to take pictures of sunsets; it isn’t just for the beauty, there is something else I am trying to capture that I simply cannot explain. A mystery surrounds it, maybe it is what lies behind the shuttered windows, maybe it is the fact that behind every closed window lies a home, a world’s center, in which countless memories, experiences, and tiny everyday moments occur that I may never know about.

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But now I find myself in the curious position of being on the other side of the window frame. I am lucky enough to be one of the lives that exist unseen from the looker-ons below on the top layer of windows that speckle the Roman façade of this apartment building. I am the one within the window looking out, the one hidden from those looking on from outside. What I have discovered from my perch above the streets of Rome is that even on the inside, you never stop looking. Just as those down below crane their necks to look to the windows above, those behind the windows are still looking out, either up or back down below.

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I am not alone in this either, I see my neighbors, and the people across the street in the apartment buildings all around my own, and they are always looking. There is something unique about the look of a watcher, something that speaks of a desire that comes from an unknown place in your soul. A searching soul. They know not what they are searching for, but they are endlessly driven to look, never knowing the origin or the destination, only knowing the face of what they seek when it is right before them. Then and only then is it clear where or what our seeking eyes were wandering towards.

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People will come to their windows, some will throw them open with grace of arms opened wide, others stand behind the glass with their nose only centimeters from the glass. Others emerge onto flower covered balconies, resting their elbows on the wrought iron fences that mark the outer limits of their personal world, turning their head this way and that endlessly. But the most important moment of looking isn’t the approach, or the slow wandering of eyes over what there is to survey above or below, it is the moment that person turns away. There is a strange pain in that lingering moment, the desire to never stop looking, but pulled by the weight of other everyday necessities, the seeker slowly turns, the body twisted, but the eyes remain looking over their shoulders. Seemingly unwilling to stop the never-ending search, hoping that in that last moment of looking the object of desire will be made know. But often, nothing illuminates itself, and the seeker sadly turns and walks back into their home to return to the normal everyday actions that beckon back inside.

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What intrigues me even more than watching the other seekers from within their window frames, are the windows that remain shut. The windows that, even if the window shade is not drawn, no seeker ever comes to peer through the glass onto the world below. There are so many seekers, and over my months here I have come to know many of them as they come forth from their homes out into the light to look, but there are still more yet, that even though I see movement in their occupied homes, they never come to the window. These people are the ones that make me wonder. Do they have nothing to seek? Did they not hear the call of their soul to search? Or did they already find what their soul was endlessly searching for? Those windows interest me, the ones who seem to have no need to seek.

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What the window frames will always be a mystery to me, the common thread that ties my life to all of those in the buildings around me. We are always searching together, maybe for different things, or maybe we are all searching for the same thing, maybe we seek each other, or maybe we seek to be seen. I do not have the answer only the ability to recognize the yearning in almost every window that surrounds me. A community of strangers, linked in this tiny habit, but unknown to each other in our independent worlds that just keep spinning even in those small moments where the seeker takes a moment to poke their heads out of their world in search of something other.

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If every window holds a world, then every building is its own universe, and I have found myself an explorer of worlds, desiring nothing more than to know the contents of what lies beyond the window just as an astronaut strives to discover new planets while drifting in the dark empty cold of space, knowing that there is more to life than your own little world.

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Window Watching

Wednesday, May 14th, 2014

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Sitting in Emporio alla Pace, just a few steps away from Piazza Navona, enjoying a cup of coffee and a pastry, it is easy to take for granted the things around me, to not take note of the truly extraordinary nature of the things going on around me. It is only when I realize I am over half way done with my study abroad experience, half way done with my time in Rome am I able to realize, not without horror, that these average everyday things will no longer be a part of my life in a very short while. Every moment I spend here is an exceptional gift unlike any other I have ever received.

My ordinary world is extraordinary in every sense of the word. Sitting in a flower framed window in a softly lit golden alleyway bustling with Roman life and her ever busy residents coming and going, I feel in the pit of my stomach how much I will miss this.

Two men with accordions strapped to their backs walking arm in arm followed by a man carrying a huge base, casually strolling. Two women happily embracing with a graceful kiss on each cheek and loud exclamations in an excited flow of Italian words rolling effortlessly off a native tongue. A woman in a window above and across the way airing out a comforter along with the rest of her laundry, after throwing open the dark green shutters of her apartments window with the double handed opening of arms of a bird taking flight. Construction workers gruffly laughing as they share a cigar on their lunch break, a slowly shifting cloud of smoke encompassing the space of their laughter and the street they sit on. A man emphatically hitting a newspaper with a questioning flat hand as he regards some article in angry disbelief. Three priests walking with arms held behind their backs smiling slightly but silently progressing down the street. A young man and woman walking together, talking under their breath with faces close and confiding, each holding a portfolio of work that is either art or architecture designs that wave back in forth with their fast walking movements, square compared to their bent over, whispering frames skinny from long nights in the studio.  These are the things I will miss. Italian people leading Italian lives, the ordinary and everyday that goes on without note that in its simplicity lies true beauty.

If I sit here long enough I can witness a thousand worlds rubbing elbows without ever meeting one another. I wonder often how many of these worlds I will be able to hold onto when I leave to return to the United States. How many scraps of memory can I cling to when the reality has escaped me and the ordinary becomes the impossible again? I suppose that is why I have this blog. A collection of scraps of memories frantically and sometimes brokenly woven together to make something of the memories and thoughts bumping around in my mind that I fear I will lose some day unless the memories become something tangible, something real. Something to cling to when I am no longer here, something to look back and to prove to myself that it all really happened, that I did live in Rome for a semester, that I did see all these things because honestly I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t living it at this very moment.

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Red Bellied Sparrow

Sunday, September 9th, 2012

A Red Bellied sparrow thrashes
Desperation clawing against the clear glass
Of a crimson window frame
Feathers soft turned brittle with fear
Push and push with no result
Fighting a one sided battle
With an immovable object
And a mind that cannot comprehend
That this battle cannot
And will not
Be won
Red bellied sparrow with heaving chest
Throw yourself against the window
No more

Cradle of mercy
Cup the wilted head of the defeated
Carry it gently
Feeling with curious fingers the fluttering
Heart beat of an animal trapped
A being consumed by fear and confusion
Nestled close against your chest
Feel the fear from a cage
Cast by the crimson shade of light
Of an escape masked with unseen bars
Carry it gently
Out into a light untainted with crimson
Where, extended into space
The cradle parts
Setting the red bellied sparrow free

Return now to the cage of your home
The red bellied innards
Of a cage you could never recognize
Carry yourself gently
For the walls are closing in
As you set one free
You lock yourself in
Creature of mercy find your cradle
To carry you free
Red bellied sparrow your feathers are all gone
Your battle has stripped you of your wings
Even now your war against this window
Between you and your dreams
Red bellied sparrow with heaving chest
And a broken heart
Throw yourself against the window
No more

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Vines

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

It seems there are windows hidden in all sorts of places. Windows to what, is the question.

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Adobe Doorway

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

Driving through the Arizona deserts and the flatlands around Utah, we found a little turquoise stand amongst precariously perched rock pilings. There were also the remains of an old adobe house, it had no roof, no floors, nothing except for a turquoise framed door and window. This was one of my favorite places that we stopped at during our road trip. It felt like an entirely different world. A place of red sand, monstrous rock pilings, and windows within windows that let us look into this strange alien place. There is something haunting in this forgotten building and the lonely doorway left behind. Looking through those windows you can see the world the way it once was, before grand cities or electronics. Just the simplicity of nature.

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Time Again

Monday, October 4th, 2010

I will find the time for you again
Another time
When time has stretched out
Like that old black cat
Just laying
Always laying there
When time has come back
Like the birds to my feeder
When time comes back
It will leave again
Flowing back home
Then out again
Time has drifted by my window
Knocking quietly
But leaves as I crack open my window
I leave a note for her
A little song
That says
When you come back
Come back again
I will be waiting
Waiting for you my friend
I seal my window
With that little scrap of paper
Left on the outside
Fluttering dangerously in the breeze
But it never flies away
It is still waiting
For time
Time to come back again
To cross this side of the tracks
And face me again
Why did you leave
Are the words
Words that left holes
In frosted glass
Words whispered
In a desperate time
That won’t leave now
Even though their meaning has
The cat is still stretched out
The birds have left the feeder
The love note has blown away
And the window is shut
But where are you?

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Posted in Poetry |

Green Window Watching

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

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Posted in Photos |

Mission’s Shadows

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

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