Back in Milan.

I spent the past week on a mountain in beautiful Ticino, Switzerland harvesting legal cannabis. The string of events that led me there: a couch surfing profile, a missed message, a toga party, an interview with an Italian affineur de fromage, and a wonderfully open and welcoming group of people.

I can still hear the clipping of the scissors; the tiny “tick, tick tick” sounds amidst the working hands of family and friends all helping to hoister a newly formed business up off the ground. The odor of the cannabis plants fading as the senses acclimated to their distinct smell blending with the mountain air..

Never would I have thought that at the beginning of this summer journey I would be on a local news station in Switzerland. Never would I have thought that I would share my deeply personal voice in a field of weed plants. Never would I have thought that I’d get a glimpse into a family, a business, and a lifestyle in a country I didn’t intend to visit.

The motorcycle trip through the alps, the late-night drinking of natural wine next to an open fire cooking ribs with a group of friends, the intensity of the night sky with its stars set against the majesty of the mountains, the discourse about what it means to have, or not have, national identity. America, Italy, Switzerland. My foggy brain drifting in and out of hours of Italian conversation as I worked to decipher a language that I am still trying to find meaning in..

I don’t know how I ended up there, exactly. What I do know is that the amount of hospitality welcoming me into the community of a newly-formed business between two twenty-something-year-old cousins still leaves me dumbfounded, awestruck, and above all, thankful.

Now, sitting on the bed of my Airbnb room in the Navigli neighborhood of Milan, highly familiar and yet as foreign as Ticino was to me a week ago, I look over at the variety of clothing resting in my single travel backpack: the expensive Italian-made full-length pleated skirt, perfectly pressed, next to the linen cloth dress that I purchased for 5 euros last summer in the Spanish hills, still holding onto the faint aroma of marijuana from the days spend cutting the plants. Both sides of my wardrobe, both sides of me.

The city has always fed some grotesque side of my ego. Either I’m fascinated by it, observing it without allowing my ego to decide how I feel, or I am fully embraced by what it means to project success in a place where it seems like everyone else has already secured it. In the mountains, I allow the land to feed my soul and to spark my curiosity through a different kind of over-stimulation. It’s not that cities are more stimulating than the countryside for me, it’s that the countryside stimulates parts of me that brings me back to my roots and allow me to flourish in a richer setting for who I am.

While on the mountain in Ticino, I woke up one morning to my friend blowing off steam regarding a wine producer in the area having problems growing Merlot grapes. These grapes are not regional to the area.. so the method of growing them in that setting is, in his opinion, absurd. Grapes that are natural to the area thrive while the ones that are not meant to be in that environment either need constant modification through interference and/or they are overtaken by insects.

Maybe I’m overvaluing the meaning of this.. but of all things, this short vacation away from my research in Italy this summer has taught me the value of putting myself in an environment that is most fertile for me to grow in. Feed my soul, not my pocketbook. Feed my sense of wholeness, not my ego.

Pondering when I should purchase my flight home..