Adherent Prototype Traditions of the unMonastery :

It is in the nature of perspective than one requires the desired distance.  It is the nature of life that it is immediate.   It may have been the stones…

Written records indicate that one of the core elements of practise that enabled the earliest unMonasterians to successfully expand and replicate their triumphs was le Cappatoste and their willingness to embrace their disasters.

Roughly translatable as ‘the Hardheads’, the guiding principle of cappatosta proved key to the installation of the first four-month iteration of the unMo at Matera.  In turn, generous amounts of  this ‘applied stubbornness’ allowed several of the first unMonks to refuse to digest the conceptual constraints of this time limit.  Living and waking in rocks, time is not fleeting – permanence permeates.  We stand stabile. Alterations which would otherwise inevitably be earthshaking, are absorbed in geological time.

Building upon reality, and at the same time refusing to acknowledge the limitations it places upon us; the unMonasterians have evolved the rhetorical tool of the 200 year’s timeline on which to stretch our decisions about unMo life.  Being from the beginning a ‘prototype’ all potential choices are viewed as proposals; personal initiatives are considered invitations.  We are inventing traditions, while the traditions are inventing us.

Il Libro degli Errori is undertaken as a meditation on our mistakes: not to apportion blame or to chastise co-workers or ourselves, but as a message to the future.  Some of our initial fumbles, classical conundrums, persistent attacks of stubbornness may escape our notice.  Where we have noticed them each category may require its own tailor-made bookkeeping strategy.  We need to isolate where we are perhaps over-reliant on our flexibility and goodwill…

Along the way it seems equally relevant to catalog our triumphs, where we failed to fall into potential traps: the very first unMonasterians created a spontaneous infirmary; to offset a compromise on the health of a member caused by the extreme damp conditions in the unheated dormitory, a night at our favorite B&B was commandeered.  As Rita Orlando put it in today’s morning circle: it may become a  huge Book of Mistakes, but hopefully not a Book of Huge Mistakes.