Back

Goodbye Sicily | Day 62 of my 2023 Journal

Cecilie Conrad·Mar 3, 2023· 3 minutes

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-Underskrift-300x133

Cecilie Conrad


Thank you for reading

I would love to hear from you. Listen to your thoughts and reflections - or praise :) It is often emotional to share our lives like this, and we get very happy when we get feedback from you. So feel free to share a comment below 😋 

See more images on Facebook

Children are fed into the schooling machine, and inside that machine is an agenda, a vast and complex and not very transparent secret agenda called T…Read more
As my parents divorced early in my life and hated each other throughout the rest of their time, my little person became a battlefield. They would alw…Read more
Free children just live their lives and can read a room, take care of others, keep themselves clean and healthy, and create good vibes and a meaningf…Read more
And as the Vikings left Scandinavia to settle and travel all over, I sometimes feel I never really left my culture. I just built upon old traditions …Read more
We are all freedom people. This makes it all very easy. We are probably all grateful to spend time together fighting off similar demons while living …Read more
To be challenged into a comfort zone is a very healthy thing. When we do things we would normally not do, we discover new elements of our vulnerabili…Read more
The place itself is simple and beautiful, very rural. The landscape of marsh, trees, birds singing, and storks. Green beautiful springtime. The castl…Read more
When I met the community of homeschoolers, it was like walking through the closet in the first Narnia book (the darkness and Insecurity of the radica…Read more
We ARE willing to go far outside our comfort zone, yet we also want to focus on what matters the most in the given situation. We realize finding peac…Read more