The day starts with a walk to the docks of Lake Como for a boat ride to the little town of Bellagio on the east coast of the lake. We stop at a lakeside park and John calls in the Light in the early morning light, with all of us gathered under a tree. Peace and bliss. Then the walk continues. The colored flags represent six color groups that we’re divided into in order to organize 80 or so people.
It’s a day of fun in the sun. Bellagio a bit touristy but with this kind of unspoiled beauty who cares? The human scale of the architecture, the friendly detail whose purpose is soothing the body and psyche, and the integration of indoors and outdoors…all of these make basic activities (like eating, drinking and walking) an enjoyable pleasure instead of some sort of flailing around in our modern, mildly toxic sea of hard-edged metal, plastic and concrete. Wow, I feel like a human! What a strange sensation. People pay large amounts of money and travel halfway around the world to feel like a human again.
The 50-foot wave of spiritual energy that crashed over us last night has settled into a calm pool warming itself in the sun. The Traveler is always integrating opposites. One minute you’re hurtling through the heavens and the next you’re putting on sunscreen, feeling the lake spray up from the sides of a boat, and strolling around in search of espresso. The spiritual energy doesn’t go anywhere, it just alternates from foreground to background and back again in a relaxing rhythm. You wouldn’t be able to distinguish our group from any other tourist group except there are a lot of closed eyes and rapt expressions on the boat’s decks.
The boat driver tells us about which celebrity or Russian mogul owns which mansion on the shore as we bounce past them, and then he deposits us for an hour or two of exploration of Bellagio, this odd little fragment of normalcy, and then we re-board and bounce back along the lake to Como, our base camp at a slightly lower level in the hierarchy of minor paradises.
The later afternoon is free time. The movement between the high-intensity spiritual energy and the low-intensity spiritual energy always provides opportunities for learning. I failed a test by pushing myself to go up to a hilltop via cable car in the hot sun in search of one more photo op instead of taking care of myself and resting and going through my photos…so now it’s 3:00 am and I’m going through photos.
The day ended with a fascinating lecture by Mark Guscin one of the foremost experts on the shroud of Turin, complete with detailed slides proving its authenticity. Unfortunately you’ll have to google it because I was so tired from my failure to take care of myself that I slept through most of it. Lesson learned. You’ll find out more from Google than from my summary anyway.
One thing I remember is that there are pollens in the shroud’s fiber that are unique to the Middle East, so it can’t be a European fake. And the way the bones are constructed in the wrist there is only one way you can be nailed up, and that causes the blood to flow in a certain way, and the shroud shows that kind of blood flow, and no one could have known any of that until recently when the shroud was already in custody of the church—which is another proof of its authenticity. Unfortunately I’m still trying to prove my authenticity by creating perfect photo slideshows, so it’s back to my self-crucifixion.
Thanks David!. Reading and looking at your great photos, I feel like I’m there with you all. I love you got to learn about the Shroud of Turin…one of my favorite proofs of Jesus’ divinity!
Seeing your photos I can almost feel the clean crisp air