A sacred heart at Abbazia San Pietro in Valle

On our recent hike in Umbria we arrived (after 17 km of walking from the Forca delle Porelle, near Spoleto, on a hot day) at the beautiful Abbazia San Pietro in Valle, where we stayed the night. With a history extending from the eight century (when a Duke of Spoleto founded the abbey as a Benedictine community) the abbey has been lovingly maintained and recently converted into a hotel (it has been privately owned since 1860).

Here's an image taken on approach to the abbey.

Put it down to the heat maybe, or my exhilaration at arriving at such a beautiful place after a steep downhill hike from the hills above the abbey (that required tacking to and fro across a rough strada bianca) but the campanile, the cloister and the church itself seemed imbued with a rich warmth – a feeling encapsulated by a small sacred heart painting on one of the walls in the family's area.

Separating the motif from its overtly Christian aspects (which may be quite difficult to do), such a devotional image can hold power for the psyche.

Of course in Gestalt we are interested in emotional levels, truths of the heart that underlie and inform (and yet can so easily be blocked from) our often more constrained responses to the world. How we keep the heart’s truths alive is a challenge.

Here also is one of the frescos in the church, restored in 1995 and pre-dating Giotto's school by about 100 years. The bleeding wounds to the nubile Saint Sebastian also interest me.

Twombly and graffiti in Rome

Reading Richard Lacayo's Time article Cy Twombly: Radically Retro, after my recent visit to Rome, I was struck by Twombly's understanding of the spirit of the place. According to Lacayo:

The classical world that Twombly invokes in his art isn't the white marble realm of Apollo. It's the sweaty Dionysian scrimmage.

On my recent visit, I was struck by the web of graffiti that adorns buildings, doors, bridges and railway sidings in and around Rome. It usually lacks an aggressive edge I often see in graffiti in Australia. Here's a taste of that Dionysian energy in some photos I took on my recent trip.



And finally, one from Sienna:

Monteluco and the noumenal

We passed through Monteluco (lucus, Latin, a dark forest or grove) on our recent hiking trip in Umbria, and for me, in this place, the noumenal was tangible.

This first image is taken on approach to the Convento San Francesco. (St Francis founded a convent here in 1218.) You can see part of the sacred wood, in which monks lived in caves.
And here is the courtyard of the convent - which has been swept and re-swept with loving attention for centuries.

Finally, a view of a cell (some have been restored). St Francis is said to have stayed in one of these.

This place has an ancient past. In the year 514, 300 Syrians, fleeing the persecutions of the Emperor Anastasius (491 - 518), arrived here and formed anchorite communities in caves. And after St Francis, Benedict founded 12 small monastic communities here (in 1218).

The effect of a place on a person is an individual thing. This place left me with a strong sense of what I've called the noumenal field.

something in a drawer

I'm pleased to say that a poem of mine, something in a drawer, has been published in the latest edition of Blue Dog: Australian Poetry. Here is the poem:

something in a drawer

like something i’ve put in the small drawer
of a dresser
(slid the drawer in
while i was unawares) −

and now cannot find
nor know what it was −

like something that a tribe
buried in the land

and then the farming folk
(generations later)
made plots and grazed sheep
changing it all −

something i want to get back to
like last summer
when sulphur crested cockatoos
screeched garrulously
at the window in full flight −

or years before when lorikeets
flocked cacophonous
to a dead tree at dusk −

until they cut it down
for fear it would fall −

or like eros making a flying intervention
dramatic but needed −

something about dark sleep in that drawer
a sadness each day that i can’t get to