I am both sunshine and thunder. It took me a van, a road trip, and 977 kilometres to finally say it out loud

I thought about the concept of being both sunshine and thunder in one body during a summer holiday in Italy.

I was sitting in a nine-seater van that my family rented with some friends, as we drove from South Holland to Tuscany. It was a trying time for me. Well, not more trying than usual.

My life during my teenage years, into my adolescence, and now my thirties has presented so many versions of me, all contrasting different questions. I think that is for most of us. The most prominent one I wrestle with, in a world that is so tantalisingly influential is;

Who was I really?

There were no amount of awards, fancy parties, beautiful compliments, or nice things that could make me feel like I fully understood my part in it. Rooms filled with people sometimes feel empty. Conversation I sat in had an echo to it, almost hollow. I would smile and nod, keeping it light and surface level. Oftentimes I would look in people's eyes, and notice...nothing.

I kept thinking of how I saw myself in every protagonist in every book I was reading. And I wondered so often, did this life I had, with these many experiences, not also mean there were parts of me other women could see in themselves?

As I sat in this van, it opened up to me.

I and many of us in this van had our own stories. We were travellers, across borders, across careers, across the landscapes of our own minds. Our adventures are both physical and metaphorical. As much about winding roads and new cities as they are about the inner terrains of faith, philosophy, and science.

The road offers you something a flight simply cannot. The passing by of endless possibilities as your eyes meet spaces of the world you have never seen for yourself.

I better understood then why people would often just get into a car and drive. It becomes a forced meditation, allowing you to only focus on what is ahead, in that moment.

And in that moment I kept feeling like I was doing the same action, driving, yet seeing no movement in life. This is what it had felt like for me so often. Always driving. Always moving. But never arriving.

The point is, you are always driving. But if you look closely, it is always a new road. And the version of you in the bus, alongside the travellers, is always different.

Progress is a compilation of the journey itself, and what you are willing to recall from it.

When we arrived, I was in awe of the villa itself.

Il Carpignone is the name of the villa, it's distinctive to the region, meaning a warm, welcoming, and sunny place to be. Upon arrival on the 3rd of August, the thunderstorms rested over the region of Grosseto. An old rural region that still holds its appeal with ancient remnants that stood, and rolling hills that collect momentum of privacy and the classic Italian escape.

You can smell the rain and the humidity like a hot cooked meal in the air.

But here, under the Tuscan sun, the warmth arrived first. And then the clarity.

I am religious, but my stomach turns at the idea of dogma. Still, I believe humanity desperately needs a different way of thinking. I believe in a presence greater than myself, more intelligent, more knowing. It is hard to ignore. I have stood before sites that predate 2,500 years, built high into the earth by hands that worked for centuries. How could people commit to building for over 500 years unless they had seen something worth passing on?

To believe we are simply alone, that only logic and mathematics shape reality, feels obnoxiously arrogant. Yes, reason and numbers have their place. They give structure to our thinking. But if you have ever felt love burn in your heart or pain tighten in your chest, you must know we are more than formulas.

I have lived long enough to know I will never be one without the other.

Sunshine without thunder is too easy to ignore. Thunder without sunshine is too easy to fear. Together they are the pulse of my nonconformity. The way I move through the world.

We are complex by design. A puzzle most people cannot quite piece together. We carry an energy that does not conform to one ideal. My greatest wrestling match is with trying to understand why we are here in such a radical, uncompromising way. I work to keep my roots deep so that my energy heals instead of withers. I have scars deeper than the lowest valleys, but gold richer than Fort Knox filling every crevice.

Under the Tuscan sun, I found that I am a bottle of sunshine and thunder.

And get this, that sunshine and thunder I could so elaborately explain about myself and the fellow travellers with me?

It is in each and every one of us.

The hardest way is the way to choose. It is the contemplative way of accountability. It chooses to move through things, to give them a name, and to give them meaning.

By the time we reached our destination, you will know the roads I have travelled. And I hope you will see your road on the inside more clearly too.

Because storms have always carried light. And light has always carried the sound of thunder.

with love,
Veronica