here's where to roll.

when i visited this little grassy field, climbing down the stone wall like a ladder, a little boy's voice floated over to where i lay sprawled on my back in the grass and he squealed to his family walking along the road with him, "there's where you roll!"

they always have it right.

this is where i've rolled, with friends, and will love to come back and roll again many times.

before moving to florence i was on another hillside out in the fuzzy-grassy rolling palo alto open space where i squatted beneath the most amazing horizontally-branched tree where around a year before i had spent a mostly silent and very powerful time with a very special person i had just met earlier in the week for the first time, and who has an amazingly gentle and sensitive nature.

he and i had quietly played a slow game of follow-the-leader and then had made mud pies in our pretend kitchen together right here under this tree. i had come back to finish the gesture of cooking them these many days later as a way of feeling reconnected with him, as he'd since moved away to another country, and in the meantime had also, undesired by me, moved out of the possibility of being my soulmate into the category of being a friend.

as i was doing my quiet play, i savored the act of collapsing of time, bringing that day a year before back as if to the present and continuing it. i then heard a little boy's voice drift over to me from quite some distance away on the trail as he was walking by: “mommy, what is that lady doing?”

and the mother replied, of course, that she didn't know...and a few seconds closer on the road toward where i was under the tree, i heard him again, but this time he spoke in the tone of a suddenly dawned realization, an “aha!”, saying, "she's cooking." to which his mother quickly asserted, "no, honey! she's not cooking-- ". as absurd as that idea was!

but i was cooking... the boy saw clearly. like le petit prince who can see that the bump of the snake is the elephant inside. it's so obvious. i was cooking in silence alone to somehow pull together this lost heart of mine. to bake it, to warm it. as if doing so would rewarm, would bring back, that time. an italian filmmaker, walter veltroni, has just released a documentary called "i bimbi sanno", "children know". sampling from interviews with over 300 8 to 13 year olds, he meshes together their responses to the real and meaningful definitions and conundrums involved in being human. i look forward to seeing it and learning.