Ciao, Bella (Musings from My Journals in Italy)

God speaks Italian - did you know that? Oh how He loves to speak it. He loves to let those words wash over His people as they totter through the cobblestone streets of Orvieto, and Roma, and Fiorenze. He loves to shower them with flowing Italian in San Bernadino, the Duomo di Orvieto, in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, in Santa Maria Novella... And so in Italy, in Italian, English, Polish, sign language, and the most wonderful language of all - silence - I hear God speaking. 

I have landed in Italy after many hours on a cramped plane, my legs creaking with the effort of stretching, my eyelids drooping dangerously close to being shut. I force sleep away as I take my pen in hand to begin bleeding ink for the next ten days. Thus begins Italy - landscapes with rolling hills outside my window as we veer around the sharp corners of the road leading to Orvieto, a hilltop town between Rome and Florence...

The air smells crisp and damp and earthy, and I can almost taste the green I see spread out like a blanket before my eyes. I love that there is quiet here in this 12th century monastery, its white walls and high ceilings holding so many heaping years of contemplation they almost quiver. Oh how I want to treasure this country, the first sips of espresso in a cappuccino; the mint green shutters and bright clean air. There are deep roots here, of soil and war and love, of passagatta and gelato and bellissimo. How miraculous that I have arrived, sitting on this IKEA bed, drinking in the newness of another country, the fresh promise of making mistakes and hearing myself make them. I cannot pronounce "ciao" in a convincingly Italian way. At lunch I discovered that, though I adore freshly pressed olive oil, I still cannot stand olives and embarrassingly push them to the side of my plate. I discover that jet lag does set in, no matter how many times you travel.

There is so much of this trip that just feels like pure gift - a gift for the beginning of the new year, a gift of time apart from the familiar chaos of Massachusetts, a gift of presence, of solitude amid community. I almost don't know how to cup my hands around it and hold it - but yet, I am told to taste and see that the Lord is good. And I want to drink in this land like a cup of warm hot chocolate on a cold day. I want to let it soak into my bones and I want to carry this delicious air back with me. 

Our minds make better pictures than our cameras, I think. I look, and since the time I was in high school, I itch to draw, to let my mind form and reform the image until my hands can shape it even crudely with a pencil. I wish I could draw, not so that I could show others, but so that I could show myself. So I reach for a pencil and a piece of scrap paper and draw the window, and the harsh blue sky beyond it:

And I am in love with bella Italia. 

Ciao, bella. 

Hilary

Bon Giourno, Italy! (The Prospect of Silence for Ten Days)

If you didn't know from my blog post about speaking French, I am a bit of a language buff. I like to roll new words and phrases around on my tongue and let the accent slip out from between my teeth. I like the way that you can only say some things in sign language, or in Portuguese, or in Finnish. That languages, far from translating each other, really translate us.

And today I leave for a whirlwind trip to Italy. Seven hours of air travel and one stuffed carry-on (did you know that, if packed properly, a carry-on bag can contain three pairs of pants, a skirt, at least four sweaters, pajamas, another pair of shoes, and six shirts?) later, I will land in Roma... and suddenly have nothing to say.

I speak no Italian. I can mimic the sounds of "scusi" or "por favore" the words sound parroted and hollow. I can smile broadly and nod. I can gesture with my hands. But I can't conjugate verbs, use adjectives and gendered nouns, and I certainly can't pick up an Italian newspaper and tell you what is going on in the world.

And this is perhaps the most humbling way to begin 2011. I am so accustomed, on this blog, in Washington, at my college, in France - to being understood, to speaking the language and expressing myself in it. And rather than a ten day trip to France or back to 8th St, I am beginning in a place where I am a stranger, and a place where I will be asked to be a lot quieter than I am in Massachusetts.

I am so filled with words, words, words sometimes I think I will simply burst with them. But in these next ten days, as I wander far from computers, cell phones, iPods and into ruins, the Church of the Caravita, the silence of the San Paolo monastery after curfew, and the crevices of Orvieto corners, Rome streets and Florentine gelateries - I will quiet my voice, quiet my mind, quiet my heart. I will live in the place of quiet - begin the year without any linguistic trapezes, sit at a table in a caffe and simply float on the sounds of the words I don't know. My eyes will become more watchful, my ears more attentive - and blessedly, my words less.

Readers, the land of Italy beckons this morning, a siren song in the cold between my sheets, a shiver up my spine and through the hardwood floors of this ramshackle colonial house. I want to take you with me - so I will be "blogging" by journaling, and when I return, I will get to share some of the tastes and smells and sights with you. Stay tuned for the experience of the silence. 

Love,
Hilary

For when you hear a truly beautiful piece of music,

There is this poem:

Music (Anne Porter)


When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother's piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold


And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying


Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country


I've never understood
Why this is so


But there's an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow


For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest


And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country


We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams


And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows


Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander. 

I love this kind of music. The kind that flies straight as an arrow into the pit of your stomach, settling there like a butterfly perched on a branch, the kind that you keep hearing in the most silent moments, when all you see is winter, and night, and quiet. When the world is hushed, this music is still singing.

A year ago, over the winter break, my friend and I made a winter vegetable pie and sat in front of the fire, talking about friendship and love, letting our imaginations romp through sharing a ramshackle house in England and Italy, to teaching together at a school, to our lives far into the future. And we had one song on repeat for most of the night, as we watched the fire leap and dance in its grate, as we watched the cold winter night settle into itself, as the quiet settled around us like a blanket.

The song, a piece called "Canzone Popolare" by Ludovico Einaudi, is the music Anne Porter is talking about. The ache of it sinks into your bones and you almost can't bear how beautiful it is. But you are also renewed, joyful at the promise of its beauty, the promise that an Italian piano composer can sit at his piano and create something.

The poem might seem melancholy to some - focused on the ache, the homesickness, the distance between us and what was meant to be in Paradise. But I hear instead the promise, the promise that the creativity we see around us is but a glimmer of what is yet to come. When all is restored, when all is redeemed, reclaimed, made new... what kind of music will we hear then? If this music haunts us because it echoes yearning, because we, like Gatsby, are running faster, and stretching our arms out farther... then how more wonderful is the promise that it holds. The ache promises more beauty, more creativity, more life. When you hear a truly beautiful piece of music, and you feel a small knot rise in your throat, and tears gather at the corner of your eyelids at the pure homesickness for the Kingdom - take heart. It is coming.

The thief cometh not but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. (John 10.10).