I’ve been reminded about how we find alluring similarities between distant places we’ve never seen before and others we might have seen often and thought nothing about back home—how in one amazed moment the two connect, ignite.
This whitewashed monastery on Santorini (right) which has the same organic shape and feel as Ranchos de Taos, the church Georgia O’Keeffe painted (two on the left; in black and white I almost can’t tell them apart). The bread ovens—fornos—at Ostia Antica, Rome’s ancient port, which remind me of the hornos where the Pueblo Indians bake bread back in northern New Mexico. The piñon sap with which the Navajos glaze their pottery, the way the Greeks did their amphoras—why retsina tastes of pine.
These psychic hauntings are part of the pleasure of travel, of going out into the world to find the part of ourselves that we didn’t know we were missing. A charged component of our writing and art.
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