Following the crowds through the 90 degree sun-soaked streets was definitely worth it.

The Vatican City: A place I was always taught was closest in this world to heaven, to God. Little 10-year-old me, sitting in my tiny 3rd grade catholic school classroom in Plain, Wisconsin, learning about the Pope, Catholicism, and hypocrisy.

I’m thankful for it.

Fast forward 11 years: I step into the Piazza San Pietro alongside thousands of other sunscreen-blanketed, water-bottle clenching people. Through my earbuds plays Eric Satie’s Gnossienne: No. 1.

I settle into thoughts about faith, divinity, history. There is a palpable sense of grandiosity here and my reverent acknowledgement of the millions of religious people taking a pilgrimage to this site leaves me questioning what I ultimately believe in, prescribe to. These monuments, bigger in time and space that I will ever be, certainly must bring forth this feeling in the minds of everyone in their presence..

Within St. Peter’s Basilica, I take in the sculpture, the art, laying my eyes on the tombs of popes that have come and gone, as we all do, all will. Walking into the massive structure stirs within me a desire to sing.. to fill the space with a beautiful sound. I ponder the lyrics to the aria drowning out the sounds of the crowds around me, and they seem to me almost sacrilegious. How can something so beautiful express such trivial emotion? Where is this reverent feeling coming from within me? The other-worldly awe tangible in the space shared with thousands of buzzing tourists is powerful.. but…

This same sense of awe, for a girl that grew up a 15 minute rural drive away from a small town of 1200 people, lay in the rolling hills of my childhood. Native Americans wandered the untouched 340 acres of land that my father owned thousands of years before we even arrived. Instead of reverence directed at sheer grandiosity of structure and historical relevance present in the Vatican City, the reverence I had intuitively as a little girl was instead directed at the beauty of nature and the same deeply held beliefs by our native predecessors to protect land, preserve it, and live according to the lay of it.

I’d walk and sing, explore and play with make-believe friends in tall grasses, wooded tree lines, trickling creeks and open fields of green. My brother and I would occasionally find Native American arrowheads; we kept a box of them under our bunk bed in the basement of the Inn. Relics of the past, symbols of what was. I’d watch countless sunsets alone, wander with our German shepherd exploring the treeline, the perimeter of “our land”. I’d witness the change of the seasons in an unobtrusive way; the foggy mornings of springtime that wet the blossoming earth, the sun-stroked countryside of summer, the evolution of the Earth’s color palate in autumn, and the pristine calm that follows the first snowfall..

The closest thing to heaven on earth.

Pantheon: Late-July, 2018.