A Statement of Purpose
Welcome! Hello! Let me introduce myself. My name is Lillian, and this is my website. "Sora Nostra" is a blog, manually designed and statically hosted, intended to host spontaneous mid-length posts about whatever topics strike my fancy. Often, when I've made websites of this kind, I've gotten into the habit of alienating myself from them, approaching them pseudonymously with the aim of conforming what I write to a broader artistic vision. This approach has had certain merits, but has discouraged writing about the full diversity of my interests, and has also made it difficult to write and post swiftly. In the interests of doing things differently, this website will conform to my personal whims and carry no guarantee of polished work.
I bought "soranostra.com" as an impulse purchase. "Sora Nostra" is a quote from St. Francis of Assisi's canticle "Laudes Creaturarum," a song I have been, at the time of writing, absolutely obsessed with for a couple months. It's sometimes said that "Laudes Creaturarum" is the first written work in Italian with a known author, with the specification that it is in the "Umbrian" dialect. But the Italian language is a political construction long anteceding the early 13th century, and "sora nostra" is no more valid Italian than it is valid Latin. In the canticle, the phrase comes up twice: for "sora nostra matre Terra," meaning "our sister mother Earth," and "sora nostra morte corporale," meaning "our sister corporeal death." The first stands in for the wild efflorescence of earthly life, the latter for earthly life's inescapable finitude. I find this tension delightful.
In the subtitle of this website, "Sora Nostra Lillian Frances," I've included my middle name, even though my tendency since I was a kid has been to keep my middle name somewhat secret. I have two motivations for this decision. First, I wanted to use my actual name to take ownership of this website, but I didn't want to include my last name for online privacy reasons. Including my middle name establishes a precedent of letting myself inhabit this site. Second, I figure since I'm named after St. Francis which is somewhat surprising, since my parents are atheists, and I also changed my name so I very well could have ditched it, and he's the reason for this site's existence, so here of all places it would be silly not to call myself "Frances."
I would give a broader introduction of myself and my interests, but it seems pointless. If you've ended up here, it may well be because you already know me, so it would be redundant. Even if you don't know me already, this site itself should in due time encapsulate a fair bit of me if I share as freely as I intend to. So I will end off here with my contact information. You can reach me on Discord with the handle @numogram, or by email at soranostra@proton.me.