Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 19

19

The Square-rigged Ship:

Restoring this ancient building was fascinating for me.

I appreciated how craftsmen long ago met and solved their building problems because I was allowed to take their work apart and put it back together with new or more sound pieces.. I had helped restore some antique buildings on the northern California coast , but nothing this old.

Saint Anne’s was established centuries ago so there is some professional archaeological interest in the buildings. There was another restoration project underway the summer I visited the monastery. Layers of stucco and paint were peeled off some of the exterior walls and archaeologists made photographic records of each layer.

The level of plaster that was exposed when I visited had a graffiti image of a square-rigged ship under full sail that had been drawn on the wall long ago by some visiting old-time sailor. The archaeologists were not there during my visit, so I don’t know how many years ago they estimated the ship drawing to have been made—but even I could see that it was very old.

In fact I had some very odd personal feelings about it. I knew it wasn’t recent because I could vaguely “imagine” my own hand sketching that ship on the wall when I visited Holy Mountain in a different lifetime long ago.

Tomasito, 2009


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