The world is made...

The world is made of the substance of our senses, and it offers itself to us through the meanings that modulate perceptions.

David Le Breton, The taste of the world. An anthropology of the senses

Me and a mother

What to say to a mother who has recently started to deal with a chronic disease that threatens the life of an adolescent daughter? What to say if she is suspended between a possible terrible verdict and the hope that reappears, but is almost seen as a threat to paradox. If things go well, as it seems, it would be even more unbearable to be disillusioned later. 
Do I defend myself behind the white coat, which incidentally I do not wear, and do I treat her as a clinical case?  Do I frame her in an elegant diagnosis and give her something to relieve the intolerable anxiety that doesn't give her peace? 

But what to say, that has not already been said, and that doesn't sound affected or unnecessarily comforting, or misplaced. 
The words come later, I sense. Now,  I have to live her same anguish, and stay there, present, while the images of my children continue to turn around into my head. 
I have to let the pain bounce between me and her, and then try to face it together: with a presence at your side pain is just a little more bearable. I hope.

Maybe

Perhaps authentic relationship is the other name of charity ...

Frecce tricolori

The airshow of the Frecce Tricolori (the Italian Air Force acrobatic squadron) held on Sunday in Marina di Ragusa, during the Addio all'estate (goodbye to summer) day.

Hope

Hope encourages reason, and gives her the strenght to orientate will.

Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate.

Rosa

Your smile put everybody in a good mood, even if it counted only on a single tooth, and was surrounded by myriads of wrinkles. They were the eyes to give light to a face carved from years of endless mental hospital admissions. You did not talk for more than twenty years, not a word, never.

One morning, the meeting at the rehabilitation centre, you arrived hand in hand with Salvatore. You laughed and watched him. He was a lot younger than you, and besides his mental disorder, he also had a serious heart disease.

He looked at you too, shyly.

We all felt a thrill of tenderness and emotion through the air.

I'm not sure if my memory serves me correctly (many years have passed, and hundreds of faces and names), but I think that from that day, you started again to mutter something vague, sometimes.

Pasteurized milk

Calm sea, the water warm, the sun shining: it's time to swim. After a few strokes, I touch a piece of white plastic. I get angry. The usual idiots throwing things overboard. Then I look at it: there is something written in Arabic and English: Pasteurized milk.

Perhaps it was thrown overboard from a ship, but the doubt it was on board of any boat of immigrants seems plausible.

In any case, I think of what continues to happen a few dozen miles off, to children, women and men balancing on a boat, suspended on hundreds of meters of water.

How many of them are dead, how many bear the wounds of what they have seen and lived before, during and after the crossing. And how many more will die...

Yes, they are "illegal", and it is right that immigration is a "phenomenon to be regulated within the law".

But what a pity, for them and for us, to see our politicians taking advantage of the Italian's need for security by affecting poor people that come from theatres of war or from extremely poor countries; what a pity to hear the European Commissioners false statements that Europe is "doing everything possible"; what a pity to see an attorney forced by law to investigate five poor shipwrecked Eritreans, veterans of war and unimaginable horrors, for the crime of illegal immigration.

What a pity, at last, to see my people slowly sliding from the option for what is moral, to the option for what is legal.

I really think that the two options not always coincide...

Bebè Aido

A few months ago the Spanish minister Bibiana Aido said that a fetus of 12 weeks is a living being, but not a human being, having the second definition no scientific evidence.

It would be like saying that a fetus of 12 weeks can sometimes develop a man, sometimes a sheep. That perhaps would have a scientific basis, in minister Aido's mind.

A group of professionals (doctors, nurses, psychologists, experts in law) then developed an interesting initiative: the Bebè Aido.

The initiative consists of the exact reproduction of a fetus of twelve weeks that sucks his thumb, in order to make people see how human looks the "living, but not human being" .

What a scandal!

A very angry spokesman of the Spanish Socialist Party said that the initiative is a "serious insult to democracy."

In short, everything is permitted, in this Europe which burns more and more into a delirious fever probably never known before.

Only one thing is taboo, and therefore is considered a very serious and intolerable offense: seeing things as they are.

In other words, and tragically, insight into reality has become a taboo.

But insight into reality would mean to recover from insanity.

My sea

Behind the fence there are ruins of the archaeological park of Kaukana, vestiges of a settlement dating from the third century BC, then commercial port of some importance in Roman and Byzantine ages, until its destruction by the Saracens.

Adjacent to the lighthouse, there is the home of famous "Commissario Montalbano".

This is "my" sea, where I grew up, summer after summer.

Ready? Let's weigh anchor!

Am I good enough with my English to start this journey? Will I be able to say what I really want to say? How many errors will make my readers laugh?

I really don't know, but when something goes around into my mind and keeps going for weeks, I think there are two choices: obsessive compulsive disorder, or this is something you have to do.

I don't like the first choice, so...