Fair Winds and Full Sails

Hi there! If you follow The Revelate on social media (Instagram and Facebook) you may have noticed we’ve made some changes to those platforms, starting with our handle, what we call ourselves. While the posts, reels and other material we’ve shared there captures well our thoughts on longing, purpose and place, Franca and I both felt we could do more to share with you how a couple of unfinished, aspiring, middle-aged adults managed to upend their lives without killing one another and move halfway around the world. 

To be sure, it hasn’t been easy. Moving to Sicily has been one hell of a logistical, emotional and thought-provoking rollercoaster of an enterprise (surprise to no one perhaps but me). One we began seventeen months ago not knowing what we’d find but dreaming that it would lead to a place where we could live simply, in a way that best suited us and, ideally, eventually, our entire family. 

 For the most part it’s been all that. But the story of moving to Sicily is not only of what we’ve found, but who. It’s about the discoveries we’ve made and are making into one another, into each of us as individuals, and into how the two of us as a couple, suddenly finding themselves all alone, should grow together. Because—second shocker—turns out life on the largest island in the Med is not all seascapes and sunset-y vistas. Any one day in Sicily can certainly be all that, but others can have you feeling as if you are a stranger in your own—albeit, now deeply tanned—skin. 

That’s not to say that’s a bad thing, but it does suggest why these past five hundred days have flown by for the two of us. We are still learning the ropes, each still centering our own personal compass, which is good news for us, and also for you, because how best to learn how to sail than on unsettled seas.  

With the newsletter’s focus on cutting through the bullshit we’re taught about life to find longing, purpose and place, we thought it would be good to dedicate social media to sharing our experience here in Sicily, as expats, as parents and partners, as explorers just trying to live the kind of life we've always wanted, and maybe in so doing help others who might be wondering how such a crazy, worthwhile, unpredictable endeavor would play out in their own corners of the globe, even if only in their imagination.  

As they say, there is nothing wrong with dreaming. 

“Throw off the bowlines,” Mark Twain wrote. “Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

We hope you join us and stick around for not only the fair winds and full sails of One Day in Sicily, but also the tempests, the pounding waves, and fearsome, feverish sea monsters. 

And if words and images just aren't enough for you, we get it. Consider Sicily Connect so you can experience One Day in Sicily for yourself.

And now onward, travelers!