Paris 🥐 + Dublin 🍺

Greetings from Paris! This is my first time back in the city since 2019. So much has changed since then-- both in my personal life and the world at large. Paris is the same... but different, it seems. Or I've changed, so I'm experiencing Paris differently?... 

But let me back up a bit. 

The reason I'm in Paris for a bit of fun is because I was first in Dublin for a workshop. I co-hosted Stories to Live and Die For, Seeing Your Life Through the Lens of Story with Sabrina Gorlitz. It was five days of existentially challenging yet deeply insightful explorations into the connections between living, writing/creating, and dying. 

I think the experience helped us all prepare a little for the inevitable end and offered fresh insights and new perspectives on why we feel an urge to create and how we might go about doing it in the coming months and years. (An exploration of regrets was a particular highlight.) I'm in awe of each intrepid participant who crossed the pond and dove into the deep conversations that may have seemed a little strange at first but turned out to be nourishment for our souls. May your creative visions flourish from the fertile ground of our time together in Dublin.

Dublin is also a special place, with a slight hum of "home" for me (I have some Irish roots, one quarter through my paternal grandmother; I wrote about her here). It's a city full of literary history, music, and lots of Guinness. (And that lilt of the Irish accent melts my heart every time.) Though it wasn't my time to be a tourist, I enjoyed getting to know the neighborhood around the workshop location, the Irishtown Chapel of Ease. And a bunch of us were regulars at the friendly Cat You Café.

Speaking of cafés... The sun is shining in Paris and I really must get out and skip along her fabled streets. Though much has changed inwardly and outwardly these past six years, this beautiful city continues to be a place that makes my heart happy. In many ways, Paris will always be Paris, yet I feel more willing to embrace the truth that nothing in life stays the same, objectively or in terms of personal perception. I think the workshop in Dublin drew back another nearly-invisible veil to reveal more truth of "how life is" in a way both sobering and tender. I know I'll be unpacking more of that experience throughout the fall.

For now, I'm grateful to have had the freedom, motivation, and opportunity to travel to two such literarily rich cities, and I'm happy to have them both be part of my living story right now.

“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris."

~ Ernest Hemingway ~