I was mopping the floors and thinking about how much I miss nature today. Green grass. Open spaces. The horizon. Trees and branches, buds and blooms. The great, great , great divide that’s dividing us all. I rarely see the moon. Stars never. But they are near and dear to this city. You feel them close even if you can’t see them. And I realize it is a city I can live in for one word and one word only – not “beauty”, not “history”  not “grace” or any other word that seems to sing in one’s mind when we think of Florence, but  because it is “organic”. It’s alive. It breaths and decays and crumbles as we all are doing. Parts are powdering into dust everywhere you look. Parts of it smell good other parts stink – piss and blooms and birdsong mingle in a single alley way. Shadows are cast and fade.  It is alive as surely as I am alive and I live in its heart and am a part of its crazy fucked up metabolism. Nonetheless, in the hot days of summer we go seeking  for “nature” –  and find more often than not “human nature” – in the piazzas, in the small claustrophobic  parks, resting on a park bench, or in the cool doorway of an old church. No rolling hills, no amber waves of grain. But life cycles, cycling and cycling before our very eyes.