Goodbye Sicily | Day 62 of my 2023 Journal

We arrived in Sicily in mid-December. Now we are leaving. Sitting on one of the beaches, watching my seventeen-year-old son walking along the coast, I am touched by what Sicily did to us.

It feels like we found a new home. One more.

Our new friends and hosts at Villa Nina shared with us a saying from this Island. “Sicily makes you cry twice: Once when you arrive, and once when you leave.” I get it.

The beauty here makes you cry. The welcoming people. All of the blue colors of the sky and the ocean. The special light of the sunset. The produce. The mix of cultures, the layers of history.

It is with heavy hearts we will cross the Strait of Messina today. Yet, I am sure when we set foot on the Italian boot, little butterflies will wake up in our stomachs as new horizons await.

We stayed six weeks in beautiful Vila Nina in the southeast and another five weeks of driving around the whole island. Still, there is a lot to come back to. We never visited Erice or Taromna; we were barely inland and did not explore the volcano. We did not visit any of the surrounding islands.

It is wonderful to know there is a lot to come back to, and it is lovely to have fallen in love with a new place on the planet.

This Is the insight of today. Goodbyes are not sad. They are always Au Revoir, “See you again.” Goodbye means I love you, and I will take you with me in my heart. Thank you for this time, thank you for you. It means to trust in the process of life. It means new adventures await. It means this is good, and other options are good as well. 



We say goodbye all the time, and it does not leave us sad. We feel the love, not the deprivation. We feel grateful, not sad. We acknowledge that: “Time is a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff” - therefore, so is goodbye.

We are here now, always, and forever.

Under the stars.

In time.

And space.

Love and light

Cecilie Conrad

Thank you for reading

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