This may not be an accident...

Part of me regrets that I could not have anticipated the tech issues I'd have outside the US. Part of me recognizes that it is at least partially user incompetence and partially misplaced user trust in a six year old laptop, which will be blessed and retired as soon as I get home. Part of me acknowledges that internet connection at the library, which is nothing short of miraculous and such an anachronism (in reverse dynamic to how I typically use that word) in the gorgeous, musty library filled with real paper books, is spotty and unreliable.

But what I find I am dealing with, and what I was acutely aware of in Florence, is the choice I must make between living the moment and analyzing and recording it. Yes, I meant to blog more, but I found that I'd rather be present to the person with me than the computer and to the beauty that confronts me rather than the page on which I attempt to offer my pale reflection. I do have time to write here, and I find myself getting lost, in the very best way, in the library, which has resulted in some poetry I didn't mean to write (and which doesn't mean it is worth more than what I got out of writing it), and some lovely rabbit trails I've wandered down only to find unexpected treasures.

In Florence one day I watched a group of darling young students, sent there at great expense by their parents, sitting on a curb in the presence of nothing less than the miracles of the baptistry and Duomo and the bell tower built by Giotto, each of them in their own private world of texting. So many people, wherever we go, more attentive to email and facebook than to where they are and who they are with. And I'm fully susceptible to this. But much of my interior dialogue has been concerned with this dilemma, but also the poignant awareness that I cannot possess even the most magical moment by loving it more fiercely.

(An aside from my perverse imagination...picture Mary with an iPhone in her hand letting the angel cool his heels while she texts her BFF "OMG...") Yes, indeed, OMG!

And so today I am disciplining myself to recording as best I can the moments I would like to possess. Words are all I've got, and they are inadequate. I took enough photographs of the things I could photograph, given that most museums and churches forbid them, not that that stopped a lot of people. But JB and I acknowledged that we are at heart a couple of goody-two-shoes when I found a guard and asked permission to go into a roped off area of a chapel at Santa Croce to get a picture of an Annunciation while other people tromped around wherever they wanted to go and snapped away as the guards shouted 'no photos!' Actually most of the art works I want to deal with are available online in much better form than anything I could get with my camera or iPhone or iPad. There is one I haven't found, though, the third Andrea del Sarto at the Pitti Palace, the one with the warrior angel.

One moment I'll hang onto forever. Betsy and I walked to the convent at San Marco, which is pretty far from our flat. The minute you get into the cloister it is as if all the traffic and bustle of Florence is miles away, and you feel as if you are out in the country, which it was when it was built for the Dominicans in the 12th century, when they were a new order dedicated to preaching orthodox theology to combat the Albigensian heresy that all matter is evil, hence a repudiation of the doctrine of Incarnation.

If there is one reality I've been in touch with on this pilgrimage it is Incarnation. It is that holiness can and does indwell matter. It dwells in people and places and works of art and Italian food, for sure.

And if you know me, you know how I feel about the ministry of preaching. So, here is this magical place, this open, green space just inside the walls that face one of the busiest bus hubs of the city, a square that is filled with beggars and gypsies, and directly across from one of the best focaccia shops in Florence. Holiness in all of it, replete with noise and dirt and deliciousness. You walk into the cloister and the first thing you see is Angelico's crucifixion with St. Dominic. San Marco is all about Beato Angelico. His sweet theology is the essence of its presence.

We loved the paintings -- his delicate Virgins, the compassionate Christs, his vision of heaven and even hell, and the musician angels, two of which have hung on golden boards in the stairs of my house for as long as I can remember. We start up the stairway to the monks' dormitory, my sister half a flight ahead of me, due to my recently unreliable knees, when she stops at the turn and looks back at me with an aghast look on her face, which I read to mean that there are more steep flights of stairs to climb.

But no. When I arrive on the landing I see that it is that the Annunciation is right there, only half a dozen steps away, as unexpected a confrontation to me as the angel's arrival must have been to Mary. It is huge, painted right on the wall, this moment frozen in time. This is the sermon preached to dedicated monks every night last thing before they go to bed. I imagine that like anything they became accustomed to it, that it wasn't always  shock to their psyches that it was to mine first seeing it.

But I see it as a call to presence. To attention to the moment in front of me. I'm going to be doing a lot of writing around the Annunciation. Actually, I have begun, and have had some surprises of my own. For now, though, I'm still wrestling with the dilemma, and I'm going out for a walk because the morning is beautiful and chilly and the trees have turned and I am actually in Wales, and along my way I'll meet lots of dogs running happily along the trail. I'm asking all their names because I'm in the market for a good dog name.