Chapter I
The life which is unexamined is not worth living.
Socrates
“You are my last prospect,” Laura’s voice quivers.
“That sounds ominous,” Dr. Yeonas, a youngish woman with black, curly hair clasped behind her ears and soft hazel eyes, smilingly responds.
“Yes, and a little silly,” Laura shyly admits. “I’m smart and reasonably attractive. At least no one seems visibly repelled when I appear. I’m effective as a lawyer. After a liberal arts degree, I didn’t want to teach or face individual clients six to eight times a day. Legal research possibilities appealed to me. I’m socially adept but a mess of stress that I can’t seem to escape. I’ve tried most modalities—meditation, Tapping, Reiki, healing touch, hypnosis—without any success. I’ve avoided hypnotherapy because I’ve never believed in it. Now, I’m truly desperate so I’m here. I’m hoping that I am wrong, that you can help.”
“Oh, just a minute. That’s Sister Matilde, the cloister’s infirmarian, who just called for me. Her pale gray shift almost matches the kitchen garden’s stone wall and the step on which she stands. But her bone-colored apron and black veil contrast to the background enough to make her visible. She looks up to admire the cerulean sky beyond the cliff rising from across the river and then downward over the four-foot high wall to the panorama far below.
“I join her, and from our eagle’s eye view, we follow black ships quietly passing on the smoky-gray Rhine, its water reflecting the shadowy shapes of fluffy clouds floating above. On the riverbank opposite, small olive-green, neatly-spaced vineyard rows stretch across the steep hillside at odd angles to each other, covering all available ground before ending on rocky outcrops. They juxtapose with intermittent fallow fields that rest waiting to receive new grape seedlings, perhaps next season?
“In Bingen’s port, below the convent’s high perch on our side of the Rhine, we watch silhouetted figures load a black barge with sandy-colored Salinental Valley salt recently arrived via the Nahe River that flows east from Trier into the Rhine at Bingen. The workers’ chatter climbs up our steep hill. Another barge awaits a load of Riesling wine, the skins filled from the vineyards terracing up the sides of the Nahe and the River Glan that joins the Nahe just to the west of us.
“I start watching for him. His eyes and slightly bronzed skin betray him as a foreigner, certainly not someone from the area vineyards with their mostly pale features and blond hair. His soft-black eyes look not at but through me, as if I am not even present. I spy on the servant who brings him food from the kitchen and arrange to stop by the chapel when he might be eating, briefly peeking inside as if to assess his progress. He quickly becomes a magnet that holds me in his field.
“I begin quietly entering and hiding in the chapel shadows. Now, taking a break from his pounding, he has begun a mural, a smiling Miriam clapping her timbrel while delighted women dance behind her. Reds, blues, greens, yellows swirl around and within the figures, almost obscuring their clarity in the sinuously flowing color. The lovely, happy women sway across the wall toward an unfinished segment that bears markings of a Virgin Mary and her child smiling at the procession. Its glorious movement uplifts me. I can almost hear Hildegard’s crystalline chants soaring upwards to the ceiling.”