Writing is influenced by so many things, from your mood to the meal you just ate to the temperature of the room and the comfort of your chair. Writers all dream of finding the perfect spot to do our work, quiet and undisturbed but surrounded by beauty and inspiration. We all have to settle for what we have, an old armchair in the bedroom or the kitchen table or the hotel bed at a Hampton Inn.
Some writing spots, however, are better than others, and some, occasionally, are spot-on perfect. Once I found a place so perfect, so sublime, that I had to bottle it up and save it for a rainy day. Even now I regularly retrieve the bottle and pour it out whenever, like today, my chair is uncomfortable and the room is cold and the sky outside is grim. Today’s bottle contains a stone patio on the city walls of Montepulciano, Italy, high on a hill in Tuscany.
As I tip the bottle, out pours words, and within the words form images. A secluded stone patio, perched high on the rim of a fairy-tale city, in deep shade but on a warm, sunny day, with a sparkling sky of crisp, hard-edged clouds piled up like towering mountains. As the memories flow out of the bottle I find myself surrounded by the sounds of nature, thousands of songbirds hidden in tall fruit trees, the breeze in the leaves of the surrounding shrubs, the smell of jasmine and roses.
Behind me I begin to sense the weight of crenellated turrets on the fortress wall, and inside the massive wall houses rise high above me, brick and stone with dark windows filled with tales from a thousand years of history. I gasp with wonder when the six-ton church bells shake the mountainside with their deep rolling peals at noontime. Out pours a sensation of soothing and playful movement; of butterflies and clouds, of a susurration of swallows as they dart and flow through the vast skies in front of me.
The warm liquid from the bottle flows over the edge of the precipitous patio and down the mountainside to paint a vista of rolling green hills, backed by a range of distant mountains. The hills are draped by dark forests and green-and-gold fields of wheat and barley, by geometric rows of olive orchards and vineyards, and dotted by terra-cotta-roofed farmhouses. On the the crests and ridges appear relics of romance and adventure from bygone millennia: walled villages with high watchtowers, mysterious castles, a majestic basilica topped with a turquoise dome, brick palaces surrounded by gardens of colorful flowers and rows of exclamation-point cypresses along ancient roads.
For an instant I have returned to the Via de Colozzi in Montepulciano in the heart of Tuscany, in the ancient land of Rome, the very place that the word “romance” was created to describe, sitting with my iPad on my lap and a dripping-ripe plum in my hand, and looking out over the Val d’Orcia toward the blue Apennines. A perfect writing spot; a perfect moment.
Life comes sprinkled with perfect moments, and the real trick is recognizing them when they occur, and taking the time to be fully alive with all your senses on full receive-mode. In these moments, you should suck it all in, the light and the sounds and the smells and the joy, and bottle it up with written words so that on some stressful future day you can pull the bottle from the cellar where you keep the precious memories, and crack it open, and let just a little taste of the light and air from Tuscany escape again into your world.
The bottle of words has allowed my imagination and my reality to come together in a rare agreement and once again I am in my perfect spot. I would not trade it for any other place in all creation. I know that I will return here again and again, when I am trying to write in a crappy airport hotel room with a noisy air conditioner and stained carpet, or a cold gray office with an uncomfortable chair, and I will once again watch the sparrows of Montepulciano swoop and dart in a crystal-blue sky
Write it all down, folks. Write down the perfect places and moments, because when you do, you make them immortal.
June 2013
Montepulciano, Tuscany
Be First to Comment