Layers

"Would you like some drinks, or would you like to see the caves?"

This is a real question posed by a real person. This person was the beautiful Alessandra who not only gave us wonderful espresso and pastries, but also took us down for a free tour of the thousands of years old caverns that her father-in-law happened to find under their pastry shop some 40 years ago. We descended not only down in to the earth but down thousands of years in time to the Etruscans, and I touched a tree root that had been fossilized by volcanic movements even before the time of the Etruscans.

Orvieto is so full of these layers in all areas of landscape, architecture, culture, personality, etc. I am so tempted to push through slightly open doors that might lead to elegant chapels or some interesting leather journal and stationary shop. I am here at such an important time not only in my life, but also in the life of Orvieto. It is the 2-year jubilee in honor of the 750 year anniversary of the Miracle at Bolsena when blood dripped from the Eucharist which means that I get to enter through a Holy Door to the stately Gothic Duomo cathedral.  My program is now moving to a new monastery which will give us many more opportunities that will be different from past years. I get to experience living next to the Duomo and having class in the Palazzo Simoncelli, but also living in a monastery closer to Locanda del Lupo (our food source) and the Piazza del Popolo where the market happens on Saturdays.

I have also had the most unique and wonderful birthday of my life so far. I would never have guessed that I would spend my 21st birthday drawing and smelling the smoke from the Orvietani's chimneys, listening to inspiring poetry and prose in the courtyard, gazing at the sweeping Italian countryside below me, enjoying delicious food from Enya's magical hands, uniting with my fellow Christians in a Charismatic Catholic worship service, and enjoying some local wine and limoncello. For such a small town, it is so full of so many layers of things to explore and inspire and give joy. As I start to finally figure out where I am in the city and delve deeper in to side streets and alleys to look for drawing sites, I continually find more things I have never seen before.

I am starting to recognize people in the streets. I always wave at Slavik when he's working in Montanucci's. I have heard angels sing in the form of nuns at Buon Gesu.

Every day and every meal gets better than the last.

Ciao!

View from my window of which I can see the corner of the Duomo 

courtyard behind our temporary home before we move into the monastery

      The beauty of the city of Orvieto is breath-taking in any context, but it is especially beautiful when one has been trapped within the confines of the Fiumicino airport in Rome for nearly 9 hours. Delirium luckily is also a great bonding mechanism. Me and my 19 other fellow students have now seen every possible weather condition in a day and have been given a very warm welcome despite the freezing cold weather. The warmest welcome came from a café which treated us to pastries and cappuccinos on the house and from the priest of the parish chiesa (church) of which we attended mass this morning. He invited us to join them on the journey to Easter (which can be even more deeply understood concerning our journey to the cross and in community), and the passages that were read seemed catered to our experience. The first passage was about Abram needing to leave his country in order to show his faithfulness and for God to create him into the man he was to be, Abraham. The third was the Transfiguration of Christ, and the fourth a passage about how we are strangers to this earth and citizens of heaven. I am so excited to begin a life that is not so full of Italian clichés, but full of lovely surprises on every corner. From the karaoke at the local restaurant where we have all of our meals to the cats that climb up in my lap and fall asleep as I enjoy a cappuccino in a café, Orvieto is proving to be all and more than hoped for or knew I wanted. Here's to becoming as close to the town, history, culture, and my community as the urban city center is close to the countryside... which are almost indistinct from one another. Unreal.

Framework for My Semester

"Maturing the Elementary." Linoleum Relief Print.

Purposes of my program a.k.a. the way I will be living:

1. To provide contemporary American students – whose lives are lived largely after or without tradition – a vivid experience of tradition in art, spirituality and worship, and civic life.

2. To inspire young people of faith to re-connect with the artistic, cultural and spiritual traditions of the past, neither in a mood of nostalgia nor in a mode of academic dispassion, but to foster a creative response to the past in order to shape a humane future in the arts and culture.

3. To establish a workshop environment that invites collaboration between teacher and student, fostering a community of makers and learners answerable to one another.

4. To give students an experience of rhythms of life slower and simpler and more embodied than the forms of contemporary American life by dining together, encouraging sustained conversation, experiencing the traditional liturgies of religious life and civic celebrations, living more closely to the earth in the midst of vineyards and olive groves, and by trading the automobile for the foot.

Such purposes may make Gordon IN Orvieto appear to be hopelessly old fashioned. We believe, rather, that the program’s vision may prove to represent a counter-cultural avant-garde, addressing hungers that people feel deep inside without fully recognizing them. We hope that our program in Orvieto can be radical – going to the roots -- pruning back unconstrained foliage to nourish the roots of being human: namely, an incarnational mode of human being that can touch the spiritual in the material, that can hear and see the invisible things of God in the visible things of God’s creation, that can sing with Saint Francis

Waiting for the Clouds to Break

"Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar." -William Faulker, The Sound and the Fury

Now and Not yet. North and South. Familiar and New. Simple and Complex. Childhood and Adulthood. Comfort and Risk. Rest and Work. Expectations and Reality. Holding on and Letting go. 

It's all in the air, and I'm just waiting for the clouds to finally break so that my next big adventure will unfold. 

Two weeks till I arrive in my new home in Orvieto, Italy.