He covereth the heavens with clouds and prepareth rain for the earth.

Saturday, 1st Vespers of 2nd Sunday after Easter

Ps. 146

Great is our Lord, and great His power *
and His wisdom is beyond measure.

...

He covereth the heavens with clouds,*
and prepareth rain for the earth.

He maketh the grass to grow on the hills*
and herbs for the service of men.


Happy Sunday.

Just a few pics from the last few days.


On the way home from the shops.


Looking up along our lane to the hamlet of San Fortunato.

 Everything coming along nicely. I really do trim it all back regularly. But the next day it's back to this.

A lot of gardening is just waiting to see what will come up. I didn't plant this. Or at least, I don't remember planting irises here. Quite a lot of the seeds I tried last year have only put out plants this year. Nature has its own ideas about things. 

These beautiful bearded irises did nothing for the first two seasons, but I've been trying to make them more comfortable, mulching with compost. It seems to have worked. 

Had the first two today. Not quite perfectly ripe, but the snails were already having a go. It started pouring or I'd have finished the job of collecting some dried cut grass to use as straw mulch.







































California poppies. They came up from a packet of mystery-mix last year and were quite modest. This year I'm having to stake them up and be quite ruthless in cutting them back to give the strawberries enough light and space.



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Spring

The advantage of having 20 inch thick stone walls is to keep the house cool in summer, and it does work. Unfortunately, it also means that the house stays chilly when it's nice out in spring.

So...


Why not?

Theme music for the day...





~

Dulce Domum

The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture--the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.

But it was from one little window, with its blind drawn down, a mere blank transparency on the night, that the sense of home and the little curtained world within walls--the larger stressful world of outside Nature shut out and forgotten--most pulsated. Close against the white blind hung a bird-cage, clearly silhouetted, every wire, perch, and appurtenance distinct and recognisable, even to yesterday's dull-edged lump of sugar. On the middle perch the fluffy occupant, head tucked well into feathers, seemed so near to them as to be easily stroked, had they tried; even the delicate tips of his plumped-out plumage pencilled plainly on the illuminated screen. As they looked, the sleepy little fellow stirred uneasily, woke, shook himself, and raised his head. They could see the gape of his tiny beak as he yawned in a bored sort of way, looked round, and then settled his head into his back again, while the ruffled feathers gradually subsided into perfect stillness. Then a gust of bitter wind took them in the back of the neck, a small sting of frozen sleet on the skin woke them as from a dream, and they knew their toes to be cold and their legs tired, and their own home distant a weary way.

Once beyond the village, where the cottages ceased abruptly, on either side of the road they could smell through the darkness the friendly fields again; and they braced themselves for the last long stretch, the home stretch, the stretch that we know is bound to end, some time, in the rattle of the door-latch, the sudden firelight, and the sight of familiar things greeting us as long-absent travellers from far over-sea. They plodded along steadily and silently, each of them thinking his own thoughts. The Mole's ran a good deal on supper, as it was pitch-dark, and it was all a strange country for him as far as he knew, and he was following obediently in the wake of the Rat, leaving the guidance entirely to him. As for the Rat, he was walking a little way ahead, as his habit was, his shoulders humped, his eyes fixed on the straight grey road in front of him; so he did not notice poor Mole when suddenly the summons reached him, and took him like an electric shock.

The Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame

~

It occurs to me that all the literature of my childhood was about the same longing for home.



~

"They know in their bones that something has gone terribly wrong..."

Blessed fellowship of likemindedness.

John, a longtime reader, sent me a link to a blog by a guy who is doing what I'm doing, and apparently for much the same reason. Brian Kaller is apparently trying to raise a daughter in a way that is not in keeping with the mainstream. It seems like a pretty good idea to me. I don't have a daughter, but I have got latent maternal instincts. I feel the urge to teach people the things I was taught. I'm more glad than I can say that I'm not the only one.

Let’s say we've lost most of the self-reliant skills and classical education that our forbears posessed. Let's say we have replaced them with a culture of buying and discarding things we don't value, and staring at glowing screens. Let's say you want to try to rediscover an older way of life, believing we will need such things again. And let’s say you have a daughter.

Restoring Mayberry

When I ask most modern people to remember a particular decade, they usually remember the television shows and video games that took up much of their young life, or the clothes and hairstyles that were fashionable. They remember what Hollywood celebrities were doing at the time more than their own lives. They don’t typically remember what my elderly neighbours do, like the wildflowers that grew in a particular meadow, or peeking as children into the nests of herons and listening to the eggs. They don’t remember playing children’s games, or exploring the woods, or swimming to an island in the middle of the pond, or declaring themselves kings and princesses of their newfound lands. Most of them never had the friendships to even have such adventures – people moved around too much, or were always playing video games - even if they had been allowed to roam, and even if there were any woods to explore.

Most people my age spent 20,000 hours of their best years warehoused in a school that looked like a prison, but few remember anything they learned. Most remember spending many more hours in the backseats of cars, but never rode a horse or sailed a boat as children, or did anything that depended on skill and subtlety. Most modern people grew up with enough toys to fill an orphanage, but remember few of them, no more than their own children can remember the fifteenth toy they received last Christmas.

Perhaps most importantly, most people my age don’t remember ever having done anything useful. As children they might have been indulged or ignored, but when I ask if they ever contributed to the family, most are confused even by the question. A few cleaned their room or raked leaves outside. But few people my age grew up feeling necessary, or learning any skills, or feeling alive.

As working adults, most people I know spend their waking hours moving electrons around a screen, but they are still not necessary, and they feel it. Most depend entirely on electricity, but have no idea where my electricity comes from. They depend on pressing a button to keep warm, but don’t know what the button does. They need purified water from the tap, but have no idea where it comes from, or how pure it really is, or how it could be cleaned.

They know the president, but not their mayor or councilman, and know more about their favourite movie star than the old lady down the road. Most, I expect, have spent far more time watching others make love than they have making love themselves, and have spent thousands of hours watching actors feign death but have never bathed a body for burial.

Many Americans these days see family only on uncomfortable holidays, have no traditions to pass down, and little knowledge of songs or stories older than their parents. Most have spent their lives drifting across an ocean of strangers, committed to nothing and no one. No wonder suicide, which was once rare, has become a common cause of death. Most people don’t kill themselves in any identifiable way, of course – but when I return to my native country, I see many people who have ballooned in size, or require drugs of one kind or another to get through another day.

Even those who are nominally successful – who live in houses the size of barns, drive trucks the size of school-buses and have enough toys to stuff an orphanage – remain deeply unhappy. One way or another, they grow angrier every year; they know in their bones that something has gone terribly wrong.

~

Glad I'm not the only one to have noticed.










The more I think about the Beguine idea, the more I think if it is going to be useful, it has to encompass some kind of educational and hospitality aspect. The idea keeps coming back of having people to stay, receiving guests, according to the Holy Rule, is receiving Christ:

All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35). 2 Proper honour must be shown to all, especially to those who share our faith (Gal 6:10) and to pilgrims. 3 Once a guest has been announced, the superior and the brothers are to meet him with all the courtesy of love. 4 First of all, they are to pray together and thus be united in peace...15 Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received...

And helping them reconnect with a more authentic way of life.

As this gentleman has pointed out, even the very materially wealthy people of Modernia are culturally impoverished to the point of absolute penury. As he says above, children are given toys and told to go away and stop bothering their parents. Anaesthetised by video games and screens, they are raised by machines who can teach them nothing useful, nor teach them how to be useful themselves. And I know young people feel this lack. I have friends younger than I who can't sew on a button or make a pot of tea.

There simply must be way not only to preserve this kind of life, but to help others discover and grow in it as well.



~

I have defeated entropy!

Well, that's a life-changing event. Someone has just given me a nice big cupboard, with doors that close with a magnetic latch.

This might not seem like such a big deal to N. Americans and Anglos, but in Italy is is normal for a home not to have any built in storage. No closets, no cupboards, shelves or anything. (Yes, it's weird, but there are so many of these little incomprehensible Italianisms that you really sort of cease to be bothered by it if you can hold out long enough to break through the wall.) You have to buy it all, and there are still lots and lots of wardrobes around, and all sorts of storage units, lurking in people's garages. If you're not used to this, you don't own these things and when you move into an unfurnished apartment, until you have acquired a few of them, your stuff sits around in boxes and tends to accumulate in stacks all over the place.

The cupboard that arrived this morning at nine am, is just about as ugly an object as the late 70s was capable of producing. Pressboard, covered in some kind of cream coloured faux...stuff...I don't know what, exactly. Anyway, it's going to get covered in paint very soon.

The real thing about it is that all my art stuff, jars of pencils, brushes and tools, little boxes of gouache paint tubes, cartons of watercolour pencils, bottles of various toxic substances, big tubs of gesso, books, palettes and assorted paraphernalia, were spread all over my work table, making it a daily chore to make space enough to actually do anything. And every night, since the work room is also the kitties' room where they sleep at night, another chore was securing everything so the entire array didn't get turned into hockey pucks.

But it's all in there now. All up high where, should the day arrive that they figure out how to open cupboard doors, it will be completely out of reach.

I feel like my nose has suddenly cleared after a long cold, and I can breathe again.

~

(Yes yes yes... Synod of Doom... Asteroid... yadda yadda...)



~

Rain

Woke up to the thunder and rain this morning. Lay in bed listening to it and feeling inexpressible joy. This was a rather rough summer, what with one thing and another, and today, with the mist settling over the valley, it looks like a painting by John Constable, and feels like a sign that troubles are suspended for the moment and we've got through the rough patch.

The fruit is heavy on the trees, the mists have risen and are hanging like wraiths over the hills, the loud tourists have mostly gone home and the sheep are wandering the Marcite in peace.


The rain has brought my garden back to life, and we're having what I have called Italy's Second Spring, the September Spring, when the rain washes away all of late summer's dust and heat and pains, and the wildflowers burst back into a farewell bloom before they settle down for their winter sleep.





I had a funny thought as I was swimming to the surface this morning, "What if everyone were a gardener? What would the world look like then?"

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,---
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Keats


Today's musical selection, therefore, is the Pastoral Symphony.



~

Dulce Domum

Greatest crazy-cat-lady pic evah!

That's sweet little Pippin on the back of the chair. He's a bit shy and not as quick to sit on my lap as the others. He still occasionally tries to suckle on the embroidered flowers on my cardie. He still misses his real mum. Poor little tyke.

Bertie loves to sit in my lap while I'm working - which he's doing right now - and loves his grub with special enthusiasm.

That's Big Henry under my left arm, where he loves to just barge in when he wants cuddles. Henry really does everything in a big way. When he wants to play, there's no deterring him. When he feels cuddly, you better feel like cuddling too because there's no choice. And when he purrs, which is nearly all the time, he sounds like a choir of Tibetan Lamas. For a thug with an unequalled devotion to a life of total violence, he's remarkably sweet and friendly. But he does this unutterably cute thing when he's really extra specially happy. He purrs, but intersperses his purring with little squeeks every few seconds, when he closes his eyes and turns his face up to you, as if he's saying 'Oh man, I am SO happy!'



~

Thursday in the garden

From the front door the day after I moved in. Those were the pots from the balcony garden in S. Marinella. That little collection of a dozen has doubled.


A day spent digging in the garden, and all the troubles of the world just recede into the background.

I haven't actually turned earth and sod with a spade in... since... good grief, I don't even know, but it has been a damn long time. It might have still been the 90s.

My sitting-in-front-of-a-computer-all-day days have been cut down to three a week, and now that spring is here, I'm hoping that the other four days will be digging-in-the-dirt-and-getting-it-under-my-fingernails days. Or stomping-about-the-fields-watching-birds-and-collecting-wild-herbs days. Either way, I'm hoping that all the digging and stomping and generally being-outside is going to help my back and my brain, both of which have suffered somewhat from 15 years of staring at the little square Palantir.

I dug, pulled weeds, filled pots and transplanted seedlings, yanked and heaved out unknown root systems, heaved out big rocks and bags of earth, raked the last of the oak leaves and filled the first of many big planter boxes. Dug it down about five inches into the ground and will build up around it with stones and potting mix and plant out some of the leftover seeds around it.

Then I went to Vespers, then I went down to the garden centre to see what was on special, and got me my first climbing rose. Yessirree, the day of climbing roses has finally come. And sweet alyssum and some kind of purple-red flowering thing. Potted out my sunflower seedlings and transplanted another rose some friends gave me, as well as the potted herbs I bought, lemon thyme and salvia. The pansies I rescued half-dead from the garden centre are blooming mightily and the garden is spotted all around with sweet little bethlehem lilies.

I'm making plans. Most of the garden is on a steep slope, and the soil is the worst I've ever encountered. Calling it soil at all is being kind. The slope is so steep that most of the soil simply washes down, leaving sand and rocks. The weeds hold whatever's left in place. The solution, obviously, is terracing. And the way to do it is going to be the hard way. Which means a lot of spade work, and buying sturdy planter boxes and finding large stones and digging them in to the slope to create steps of flat to stop the erosion.

I have a four year lease on this place, and at the end of that, I'm thinking of buying a place (somehow) so everything I do here I want to have in boxes that I can dig up and take with me. But I want it to bloom in the meantime. You can do a lot with sturdy plastic planter boxes, and if you dig them in a bit, then pile up stones around them, lace the spaces between the stones with lots of potting soil and set up barriers pounded in deep to keep it all from washing down hill, you can make a rock garden where you can't see the ugly plastic boxes.

Anyway, at least I'll be getting a bit of upper-body exercise in.



~

Stability

When I moved into this flat, I discovered that it is a common practice in Italy to rent and sell homes that have no kitchen. That is, there is a room, and it has tiles on the walls, and water, gas and electric outlets, but no sink, stove, fridge, cabinets or shelves. It was just a room. With tiles.

I took the place anyway, even though naturally I've never bought a cooker or range, nor owned a fridge or had to install my own kitchen cabinets in any place I've ever rented in a lifetime of renting flats. It was such a nice place, and so ideally located, I couldn't resist.

I figured I could improvise and sort things out as we went along. So, as soon as I arrived, I marched off to the garden centre and bought a good quality three-burner camp stove, and a large bombola for gas and all the valves and hoses and whatnot, and have quite a good cooker out of it that is working perfectly adequately. A friend in Rome has donated quite a nice fridge (which I'm assured will eventually actually materialise... some day... ). I bought a very large microwave and have had a large freezer chest for some time. Between all that, and a camp cooler for the milk and an extra book case that can double as an emergency kitchen shelf, we're off to the culinary races.

Of course, it's all pretty much makeshift, and subject to putting things together more permanently. But I am not one for just running out and getting the nearest thing just to have a thing. I like to wait until the right thing materialises, and I'm not at all uncomfortable with a little minor inconvenience in the meantime. Shift is just fine for the time being. And it's sort of fun, in an empowering way, to figure things out for myself.

But since coming here, I've been thinking hard about permanence, "stability" as St. Benedict calls it. I've still not been made an official Oblate yet, having had a year of noviciate to think about things. The date is coming up though, the feast of St. Benedict, March 21st. And more and more the concept of Benedictine Stability is in my mind. It has a lot to do, I think, with the modern notion of "commitment" and how all people of my generation are supposed to be terrified of it.

It's all very well to gypsy around the world, moving here and there according to the various vicissitudes, but eventually one runs out of reasons. I'm going to be 49 next month. I knew that S. Mar was not the last place. But I don't have the same certainty about this place. This feels like the kind of place that could very well be the last place. Whatever it is I've spent all this time looking for, I'm getting more and more certain that I'll find it only if I stay here. Or, perhaps more precisely, whatever it is I need to do, I think I might have been sent to this particular place to do.

I came across an advert in town for a piece of agricultural land, with water access but little else. Just 1.7 acres of plain old land, for €22,000. Of course, I'm a long way off being able to put together that much money, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility. My grandparents built their own house, so I'm used to the idea that this is a thing one can do. I've been looking at the websites about "natural home building," straw bale, cob and other kinds of natural, "sustainable" materials and techniques. Youtube is full of stuff about homesteading and small-scale and niche-market farming. So, there's some thoughts developing about that...

In all my long pilgrimage through the last 30 years, I've known I would eventually fetch up somewhere and get the message from God that this is the place. And it is starting to feel like that. I'm reminded of the old Greek story of a seaman who one day realised he'd had enough of the sea. He put an oar over his shoulder and started walking inland. When he came to a place where they looked at the oar and said, "What's that thing for?" he knew he had come to the right place, planted the oar and set about farming for the rest of his land-lubbing days.

In any case, two things that made me think about it more have happened in the last few days. Just little things, and they would hardly have registered if I hadn't already been thinking about Things. They're just "dots" and I guess I can connect them if I want.

The other day I took my shopping cart down to the zona industriale, the place outside town, down on the valley floor, where the non-touristy, regular shops are. Things like the garden centre, the hardware store, the dollar store, the big supermarket...I wanted some weather stripping for the windows and needed a dish rack and some emergency candles. In the window of the ferramenta was one of these...


It's an Italian thing. A La Nordica Rosetta Range wood burning cooker. A modern woodburning range. And it was marked down to €1100. I have conceived a burning desire to own this gorgeous thing. And I've been thinking about what it would mean to buy one.

Owning and installing one of these would by a kind of symbolic thing. It would mean I had decided to stay put, and had plans for the future, that I would no longer be a person living on the fringe, not an outsider in the world, looking in, but someone integrated into the human world, into this community. It's a symbol of commitment. Stability.

The second thing just happened this evening. I got home this evening and discovered my leather-bound note book was not in my bike basket. I wondered if it was left in any of the places I'd been today, a shop or the cafe or the church. I figured I would start a search tomorrow. It's such a small town that I was confident it would show up soon.

Then after I'd been home a couple of hours, the doorbell rang. It was the nice chap in town who runs a little restaurant next to the monastery I've had lunch in a few times and who I know is friendly with the monks. I've chatted with the guy a couple of times and learned that we live on the same street. He held out my book and said he'd found it in the street and thought it looked important. I suppose it must have bounced out of my basket without my noticing.

I thanked him most profusely, and he said not to mention it. "Beautiful drawings," he said, as he waved good night. It was only an hour later that it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't ever told him exactly where I lived. But he knew. And he knew the book was mine. It has occurred to me that it is likely quite a few people in town know who I am and where I live. And this does not fill me with dread. Quite the opposite.

I've wandered around life like a homeless person for 34 years. I've always known I was looking for something, some very specific thing, even if I didn't know specifically what it was. I was always very confident that I would know it when I saw it. I haven't been without a purpose in all this, but I know exactly what Pope Francis meant the other day when he said that many people grow up feeling as though they are on the outside, marginalized (to use the trendy jargon) and as though there is no real place anywhere in the world where they could possibly belong.

In a sense, this is a good thing, since we do not have a permanent home in this life. But at some point, the physical wandering will get in the way of the inner search. It will be a distraction from what needs to be done on the inside.

Well, anyway, I'm beginning to think that the wandering part of the journey may finally be coming to a close. And this is a magnificent place. It's not just the view. It's the people. I've come to the conclusion that there is a culture here of kindness, of generosity, friendliness and good will that I was rather skeptical about for a while. It's something I could certainly do to pick up.



~

Dulce Domum

I have just achieved a life-goal that until five minutes ago I didn't realise I even had: my own fireplace into which to toss the peels of my mandarin oranges at Christmas.

All my life, I've been trying to recreate the life I had at my grandparents' house in childhood. I think I'm almost there. Maybe need better towels.

And to dust more often...



~

First photos

Out the front door, looking down into the garden.



S. Mar balcony garden transported. Looking rather forlorn.



Out the sitting room window.


Door to nowhere. I think there was supposed to be a balcony outside this door, but it opens onto the terracotta tiled roof. Never mind. The view is wonderful, and it will make a nice place to have tea when I've got another table.


Sitting room, piled up with boxes.


New sink as of Friday morning!


This was a few days ago. It's much tidier now.



Out the sitting room windows. Morning in the mountains seems to follow a pattern this time of year. At night the clouds sink down and settle in the valley like a huge, mountainous bowl of milk. By one o'clock they have gone back up to the sky again and the sun shines down.

Norcia, out my bedroom window, dreaming its ancient dreams.

Little Winnie's favourite activity: worshiping the oil radiator, the only source of heat until the gas gets turned on by Eni.

The fireplace works but the chimney needs cleaning. I tried lighting a fire, but the only way to keep the smoke from filling the room was to open a window. The smoke trailed happily up the chimney then, but it rather defeated the purpose.

Never mind. All shall be sorted in time. Piano-piano, as the Italians say.













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