May 12 Friday.

Finally a good night’s sleep; I’m beginning to adjust to the time zone change. But I slept so long I didn’t have much time before I being picked up by Monica and Simona and taken to the radio station where Simona records her podcast radio program. There she interviewed me, mostly about parenting in terms of the three principles as a preliminary to the training tomorrow, and I really liked the way it came out. There’s something about the state I get into when someone translates for me—in this case Monica—because it slows me way down and while it is being translated new things come to me. Also, the day before, Simona, talented person that she is, had taken a little video of our time in Florence, edited it into a tiny little thing and posted it on the publisher’s Facebook page. If anyone out there is interested, you can see it at https://www.facebook.com/pg/errekappaedizionicasaeditrice/videos/?ref=page_internal, and I believe she did another today, which, probably still has to be edited before it gets posted.

After the radio show, which will not be able to be heard until Monday, they took me to a vineyard in the Tuscany region, in the town of Montefioralle, where we partook of a wine tasting and had some bread, tomato and meat snacks for lunch. I, who don’t drink alcohol much at all, have an extremely low tolerance, so by the end of the wine tasting I was feeling it. But afterwards we managed to walk through this beautiful little walled town.

This is what I love about Italy most. And I love Italy. But these little walled towns are so precious; I can’t say enough about them. They just do something to me. This one was pretty tiny; only about 100 people live there. But I was thinking during the wine tasting it’s amazing what becomes people’s life. This family who runs the vineyard, their life is all about wine, and they know everything there is to know about it. Much of their thinking is thoroughly consumed by it. We got a little talk in Italian from the father as he helped us do all the tasting, while Monica translated for me. It was interesting, although I’m not particularly interested in wine. One of them tasted particularly good to me.

Then we took the two hour ride to Carpi, which is where the training will be held tomorrow. Probably because of the wine I fell right asleep in the backseat of the car. Then I was given a couple of hours to chillout by myself as I checked into my new hotel, the Hotel Carpi. That evening I had a lovely home cooked dinner with Monica and her family and my translator for the event, Graziana, and her family. Her husband is from Massachusetts, so we had a lot in common (like the Red Sox and Celtics). We all talked about some of the difficulties in translating certain words into Italian, such as consciousness, peace of mind, insight and others.