Preparation for Spring Trips (Sicily or Torino) = Reading essays/articles for homework; reflecting and discussing in class; blogging in class (I do with kids):

Monday

Reflection on "On Possessing Beauty" by Alain de Botton (a chapter from his book The Art of Travel).  Respond to the following prompt.

·       Make a word painting of a time here in Italy where you saw or experienced beauty.  Get as descriptive as you can.  Avoid words like beautiful, gorgeous, love.  Keep going and going.  Write bad sentences.  Get in all the details you can.  Remember: you get to define beauty and what is beautiful.

Saturday morning.  A walk while Daniel and Tom swam and the kids got some screen time.  On weekends I don't do my around the wall walk; that would feel like the work week when I'm careful about time and headed back to work afterwards.  I head out Porta Romana and head what feels north, but I don't know whether it's north.  Daniel and his family always give directions in terms of north, south, east, west, because they grew up with the mountains in New Mexico.  But in my family, we said, left, right, straight, rotary, and when you hit x, you've gone too far, so turn around.  So I think I walk north out of Porta Romana, but really, that's might be because it's uphill.

Once I'm out of the walls, out of Porta Romana, I can put on my headphones and listen to my music if I'm running or a podcast if I'm walking.  I put on “The Long Fuse” from This American Life; I began it last week, and I'm attached to the story of the origin of the MSG scare (turns out MSG is not bad for us at all).  But I switch to listen to a Modern Love episode, a woman talking about breaking up with her therapist who, she thought, wrote her a love poem.  I listen.  But as I get away from the traffic, up farther north -- okay, really just more uphill -- there are fewer cars, so I take off my headphones.  No cars, no exhaust, no traffic lights.

There are trees, green surrounding me.  I've been up this road before, one time -- a Saturday not-around-the-wall day, a Saturday I-need-to-find-some-green-day -- running up this hill until I came to what seemed a highway, getting all the way to the white rectangle sign that read VITERBO and had a slash through it, seeing the highway and the cars speeding, hearing their whooshing, and then turning around to jog down the hill slowly, trying to be gentle on my quads so I wouldn't be too sore on Sunday.

There's a small sign on the left side, by another road that directs -- advertises? -- a bed and breakfast up this other road.  I remember it from the fall.  Instead of getting all the way up to the leaving Viterbo sign and the speeding cars, I take the left.  Uphill.  With no headphones on, I hear birds.  On my right it's green and woods; on my left a few dirt driveways spaced out pretty far.  I want to get all the way to b and b, but I stop.  I just stand there, earphones over my shoulders, phone in my pocket.  The sun is warm on my face.  I'm surrounded by green.  The birds are doing their thing, and maybe some insects, too.  I close my eyes for a moment, trying to take in these sounds as I took in the minute of the ASMR sounds Ji sent for her poetry assignment.  But I open my eyes soon because I like the green.  

I don't know which trees are which, though I recognize the shape of a leaf that I tried to sketch the other day when I was waiting for Hannah at soccer.  Maybe I could learn the leaves, one a month, and thereby learn trees.  One summer at Bread Loaf in Alaska, a teacher had us read an essay that extolled the idea not just of seeing nature and enjoying it, but learning more about specific flowers, birds, trees, leaves.  I was annoyed by this: I wanted just to enjoy the overall sensation (not the "syntax of things" as e.e. cummings puts it).  But then someone pointed out Indian paint brush to me, a flower that a friend had mentioned in a letter.  I could handle one flower, and I thought of this friend when I saw the Indian paint brush.  In fact, once I could see the Indian paintbrush, I could see and remember the other flowers people showed me, like forget-me-nots and fireweed.  I did see more.

On the one hand, I think myself a visual learner: I like to see things in print, written out, or drawn so I can understand them.  I need to sit quietly by myself to read and make notes and process what I'm learning.  I do better with a map than just directions; I can read Italian better than I can hear/understand it spoken.  On the other hand, I do not remember faces as easily as I remember stories so then I think I'm not so much a visual learner as an aural learner (or perhaps it just depends on the subject?), so I find learning faces and leaves and trees and flowers especially challenging.

But maybe, maybe I can start seeing more.