(copyright2011, Danise Codekas)
Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar. -- George Eliot
"Bella, Bella". How often I heard those words uttered from the lips of the ancestors, of those ancient Romans. Maybe it was my titian hair, or perhaps I just looked good. When I think about the people who walked past me, sitting in a cafe, who all looked as if they were privileged to live in the amazing Roma, I realized, I could never hope to attain the status of roman citizen, and I smiled. There is something about them that screams: we conquered the world and we live in the most incredible, amazing city.
I love to nightwalk. Sometimes, leaving my hotel after 2am, I walked without crowds pressing in, or buses and cabs crowding my viewfinder.
The distractions of day disappear.
There is something magical and profound at night, in Rome. A silence that defies abrupt speech and demands homage to magnificence. To defile that with conversation or guidebooks, demands restitution to the emperors, artists and popes, who created a city of awe inspiring power and beauty.
Timelessness is what Rome requires of the heart. I enter Rome with a view to finding that subject, as millions have before me across the millennia. The same feeling when I look across the ocean or into the stars.
Sitting on marble stones, at the Temple of Venus,
I realize who has walked on them. The emperors, poets, writers, musicians, sculptors, kings and martyrs, whose pleasure of seeing it as it was, without destruction, without blemish, was a lucky day, for them. If they only knew what we gaze at now with form imagined, and wonder and wish it could be as it was then.
Love is like that if it is true love, isn't it? Wishing it could be as it was once before. How many women see a man, as being the One, only to realize,now, after time, he is something less than what he was, in that moment of want?
Many women will pursue a man, they think as being the one, and many re-capture him, however, there will always be a little less of him, after time: a little less of what he was in the past, since time has changed him, through those experiences he had when she was gone. She will miss who he has become, because in her pursuit of him again, she chases the old dream and not the reality of who he is now.
When the relationship begins to disintegrate, slowly, like Rome, she blames him for becoming something he was not, when she first took up with him. And yet, all along, like Rome, he was changing across time, when she was not standing before him.
I know a woman who has re-captured the One, years after their break up. She talks about her wisdom of knowing he was the one, and that she did everything she could to re-capture him. He proposed after taking a long journey, away from her, to fight his demons, his inner voice, telling him that he did not want to marry her, she is not the real one, however to face loneliness again, to seek the woman he was meant to be with, who is still out there, was too much of a challenge. So, he handed over his freedom and engagement ring to her, because she seemed to be enough, for now.
The hoopla over the engagement has a sour, tinted taste for many, and he, one day, will be unable to live with his knowledge that she is not the One. Whether he has the courage to leave her, will be telling, as another relationship continues, on earth, with one desiring the other, more. She is not the one for him.
Yet, his fear of what the world will say, if he left her, is more frightening than living with a woman who is not, nor can she ever be, his one great love. He knows she is out there, and for the rest of time, as long as he is tied to this woman, he will search and wonder. She is on a high now, of giving discourses on love and rambling on about her engagement ring.
Hearing her say how she decided to pull all the 'guns out' and pursue him and capture him, like prey, is nauseating, in the least. She tired him out and wore him down. He is, now, too tired to break through the web of her dysfunctional care giving and seductive sexual ways. He is still looking and hoping for that one, great love, since she is not it, nor can he ever do anything to make her the One.
It is a tale, that many have heard before, and looking at the pillage
of Rome, the old seductive beauty and magnificence, carries with it a hint that it was not strong enough to sustain the changes of the heart of mankind.
It is the result of ancient beliefs and hopes, forgotten, when mirrored in the seductive powers, of those who abandoned the hopes of freedom and true wisdom. Rome lies at our feet, quietly breathing its last.
ROMANticism must have its roots in Rome.
It must, I thought, as I gazed upon the Tiber, washing away the refuse of the present, and burying the ancient tears and secrets of the past.
Reflecting the memories of millions, who hope for release from life's sorrows and defeats.
Refreshing, anew, the dreams possible of a lifetime, and channeling our desire to abandon present fears and pursue life's dreams. I am sad for this man because he is a man with a dear and kind heart, yet, I know karma is a bitch, and sometimes not doing the right thing is the choice that is made ,in order to silence the loneliness and fear in our hearts.
I hope there comes a time when light can flood his heart and soul again and standing, alone, can see the wonder, power and love that is his for the taking. I hope he finds his true love, one day. I hope we all are given that gift this lifetime.
As Yehuda Berg writes: "we are prisoners of other people's perceptions of us... Others are bound and gagged inside our marriages... We're held in bondage by our reactive whims and egocentric desires.
All these emotions, born of ego, constantly control and imprison us. This is the oldest master-slave relationship in Creation.But through awareness that we are enslaved to our ego, we can grasp the key that unlocks the chains and attaint the greatest freedom people can know.
Timeless Rome influences many things inside me and brings me to a place of clarity and joy, peace and understanding, and acceptance of my life and no regrets. I know this could be the last breath I take. I know my time on earth can be eliminated in the next second.
I also know that a man's quest to find his one true love will persist, even though, this lifetime he is putting up the barriers that will protect him from opening his soul to his one true mate. I also know that time is immaterial and nonexistent as is Rome. All actions matters and eventually life delivers what we truly want, we just may have to be reborn to receive it.
"Time is the distance between cause and effect.Time is the separation between action and reaction.Time is the space between activity and repercussion, and the divide between crime and consequence." -Yehuda Berg
