May 4, 2020

Hi friends,
Today the sun is shining and it is officially phase 2 of our nationwide lockdown in Italy. It means that we’re allowed to go outside for non-essentials, it means we can go to the park, it means we can start to walk around our cities more freely. It means we get to be a little more in the outside world, hopefully, with less fear of the virus. It means we get to see what social distancing looks like in this new world, with less strict laws and more reliance on our own sense of right and wrong.
It’s a beautiful day. I’ve been pretty quiet on Instagram lately. I want to acknowledge the whole spectrum of feelings from the last 50+ days of my life, of our lives, of this period in history. I want to acknowledge the moments of brightness and light and freedom, the moments when I started seeing everything in technicolor and really paying attention to the tiniest and most beautiful details of daily life. I want to acknowledge my unwavering love for Rome, my beautiful adopted city.

I want to acknowledge the grief, the fear, the still lingering sense of not-enough-ness and could I have done more? Achieved more? Accomplished more? The question we all love to ask these days: What have you done? Do you speak another language yet, or have you baked sourdough bread? Have you cooked complicated meals or started new daily routines or launched a new career? Or have you also been able to find the moments of just relaxing into this new rhythm? A sense of releasing a little bit of the rules and regulations you’d built around your life? Can we all accept that, collectively, we’ve been doing the best we can? We have grown, we have laughed, we have cried.

It’s been a huge global change and we’re still in the midst of it. The gift today, and every day, is staying present. Sending so much love and warm golden sunshine-y goodness to everyone out there, no matter what you’ve done or what you think you should have done.