Story
Notitia Sanctuary is the Vermont home of American artist Jonathan Jennings Harris, built in 2020 and now available for others to experience through weekly stays.
The Story of Notitia
Notitia Sanctuary is the Vermont home of American artist and technologist Jonathan Jennings Harris. It is located at High Acres Farm, his family’s ancestral home and land within the larger campus of Shelburne Farms, perched along the eastern shores of Lake Champlain, in the small town of Shelburne, Vermont.
Notitia Sanctuary was designed and constructed in collaboration with Selin+Selin Architecture and Smith & McClain builders.
The initial design for Notitia appeared to Jonathan in a vivid dream on the night of February 7, 2017. Earlier that day, he had slipped and fallen in the snow, causing the cardboard model of a previous design that he was carrying at the time to break apart. Notitia was completed exactly three years later, with his first night sleeping there being February 7, 2020, just a few weeks before the pandemic lockdowns began.
Jonathan lived at Notitia while completing In Fragments, a series of 21 rituals and matching films that he carried out at High Acres Farm from 2015–2021, seeking to alchemize old family patterns there. Notitia is one of the fruits of that work — an immersive example of “Life Art” — now available for others to experience through weekly rentals to families, friends, couples, and fellow creative practitioners.
The name “Notitia” is an old Latin word meaning “deep noticing” — the root of modern words like notion, notation, notoriety, acquaintance, and knowledge — as invoked in a classic essay by depth psychologist James Hillman, a student of Carl Jung.
Notitia’s insignia communicates the seven Circles of Care that Jonathan later outlined through his work with Sunlight Papers — offering a simple map for scaling attention across Body, Mind, Home, Love, Work, Help, and World, all existing within the field of awareness, as represented by the outermost ring of 27 dots.
A place of deep peace, great beauty, profound creativity, and exquisite craftsmanship, Notitia Sanctuary is dedicated to personal reflection and the realization of dreams.