Thanks to Dr. Gloria Lillo Alcover
for her thought and for her teaching,
which she gives with generosity and courage
and without vanity,
for the splendour of Homeopathy
and Truth.
Thanks to all the other Masters of mine,
who have given me the seed
of their knowledge.
In particular, thanks to Prof. Proceso S. Ortega,
to the master Pablo T. Paschero
and to Professor Antonio Negro that baptised me
to the Homeopathy of Hahnemann
To Brunella
who has just arrived among us
What you really love will never be taken away from you.
What you really love will be your real inheritance.
Who does the world belong to?
To me?
To them?
Or to nobody?
The visible came first
That is the touchable elisio
Although it was hidden in the memory of hell.
What you really love will be your real inheritance.
Tear from yourself the vanity!
Man did not create courage,
Order or grace.
Tear from yourself the vanity! Tear it I am telling you!
Seek in the green world which place could be yours
In reaching the invention
With the real ability of a craftsman.
But having done
Is not vanity!
Having knocked with discretion
So that Umbled would open
Having gathered from the wind
A true tradition
Or from a beautiful antique eye
an inviolable flame
that is not vanity.
Because the error is in what has not been done.
In the distrust that irritated. (EZRA POUND)
"Childhood, Memory and Return"
Which are the prints of the soul?
Which are the engines of Acting?
Which the passages of Knowledge?
Which the signs of Pain?
A young boy goes to the river with his grandmother to look
for crabs, but he does not suffer for the crabs' death,
on the contrary, he enjoys the taste of the meat and its
smell.
I was about three or four years old when I accompanied her.
She was a tall and slim woman and was always dressed in
black because she had been struck by grief that nobody had
ever been able to cancel from her heart.
The river, actually the stream, was just on the outskirts
of town and people would go there to wash their clothes.
Huge slabs smoothed by hands and feet stretched out where
the water was wide and deep.
A two feet high stony wall worked as embankment and along
it water ran, embroidered by the branches of ferns and by
my fingers.
Some red and brown crabs lived in the low cracks of the
wall and my grandmother would fish them with her towels
and with my overalls.
She had long, thin and gnarled fingers like shoots of vines,
straight as the thoughts that crossed her heart, her mouth
and her nose before reaching her eyes.
Every greeting of hers was a smile.
The fireplace in the kitchen was eternally dozy and would
come back to life with a blow of a light river reed.
The most antique rite of life and death was consumed on
the embers and I was only a young boy.
I left that river and that old lady when I was five years
old. She caught up with me a couple of years later adding
sadness to sadness.
Life is an embroidery of time and space, of shapes that
change and of love that wanders. That young boy is near
and far and near and far is that woman that had been for
me a mother and later a daughter when she lost weight and
breath. How much and exactly what we gave to each other
is a mystery and a gift of God. An imprint remains and models
Life. Through me she regained the threads of another life.
With her I learnt much of what only at that age is learnt
in life.
Childhood is a tender age of body and soul and easily feels
the caresses and insults.
During the journey of each patient that comprises a healing
process, there is childhood as place of happiness or pain,
or, as it often occurs, place of happiness and pain. A place
of separation and hugs, of lies and truth, of eyes wide
open upon the world and eyes that see nothing.
All of these are absolutely important.
And if we do not experiment moments of happiness that can
testify the existence of happiness, we will then experiment
the tragic persistence of pain.
Life will always leave other signs, but those of the tender
age are primordial traces. Scratches and caresses, shapes
on which the soul lays, suffers, organises itself, slips,
plays, trips, learns, dies.
Everyone, with their own inherited miasma, together with
the soul, spirit or demon that come to live within them,
come to this world for God's will and to carry out the aims
of their existence.
A new born baby is like a caterpillar on its first leaf.
It explores life with its strength and soul; it benefits
from the sun and the breeze and it suffers the wind and
thunderstorms. The new born baby's relationship with the
world is made up of milk, body, warmth, sounds and shadows
and its answer is elementary: joy and tears.
As soon as the demon asks for space that is when intention
arises.
While the miasmatic modulates and the demon gets restless,
the soul expands itself and the world becomes resistant
to it, and at the same time, welcomes it, it attacks it
and accompanies it, it disputes it and follows it. A child
explores life and the world as empty shapes in search of
contents and sense. Guided by pleasure and instinct, a child
learns that in the mystery of every meeting there is the
opportunity of being craftsman and artist of his own evolution
and of his own complement.
What happens and what does not happen, what is done and
what is not done, determines who we are.
The first memories of life are visual memories.
Pasolini tells of a curtain that appeared among the first
images of his memory: " a white, transparent curtain…"
That curtain terrified him and distressed him, "but
not like something threatening or unpleasant" he said,
"but like something cosmic…"
In that curtain there was all the spirit of the middle-class
house in which he was born.
That curtain became a linguistic sign of great importance
for a man that later became great enemy of the middle-class
culture.
Memories are always full of meaning, they are the elements
that maintain the distinction of reality. Memory is the
possibility of having what has been experimented and understood.
We distinguish reality on the colourful background of a
conscience deeply differentiated from lights and shadows
that pass through all the shades of blue, red and ochre.
In a patient's story, memory brings back his face, his
gestures and his eyes because it re-arranges his heart.
And the story changes into scene. He stops telling and starts
reliving. He recognises the soul that lived within him and
that now regains body, shape and feelings, and still now,
he simply seeks himself.
Martino was 70 years old. I went to see him one Sunday
morning of many years ago: he lived on a hill. On the mantelpiece
in the room where he received me, there was a copy of de
"l'Unità". He had been a communist mayor
of a small town in Umbria for many years after the war.
Many of his political enemies had been "his dearest
friends". He suffered from bad circulation and from
lombalgia which forced him to an unsteady walk.
He had disillusioned eyes, a dim and sad look.
History forced him to face unexpected and unforeseeable
comparisons in which reality did not fulfil his dream.
For several years he had been going through restless nights,
made up of distressing dreams about the war. The dreams
were crystallised memories, hidden in the most painful corners
of his experience.
I saw him a couple of months later, he was faster in his
walk and more present to himself.
He had started dreaming of his childhood and of his father,
of hills of wheat, of work; of the seasons. Tidy dreams
of a reality that suddenly disappears.
It was in late Spring, He took me into the garden. No bitterness
for the headlines of l'Unità of that day. His soul
re-arranged itself in the most sacred places of his childhood
and found peace where it had been nursed with peace.
For the psoric-syphilitic predominance of the characteristic
symptoms which were dominating and strong, I prescribed
Calcium Ostearum in increasing doses.
Memory is a window overlooking the deep veils of the soul.
Research. Creative experience. Transformation. A melting-pot
in which body, blood and soul are continuously mixed. Meaningful
image where it is possible to recognise oneself, a consequence
of destiny and fate, but also of things done and not done.
With memories, awareness arises and life becomes more precious.
A field in which we learn to untie knots and free ourselves.
Sacred because they teach us who we are and give us the
opportunity to be or become who we are.
Health is instinct of freedom that conquers each day and
each night and every moment of life together with the harmony
of the Universe. If we have eyes for a man without a God,
then life will only be an empty experience, together with
what it is able to take without paying attention to what
it owes to the world, to others and to God.
The first thought of ontological nature reached by the western
philosophical thinking is in Parmenide, in which Platone
thinks of the relationship between many and One and establishes
that All is better than the two, that it is cause and origin
of them both, meaning and sense of their existence. But
in the same way that order and harmony of All may condition
the existence and development of the two, so may harmony
and order of the two condition the existence and perfection
of All.
Awareness makes us responsible and life is no longer an
existential adventure but a path that leads, an event that
acts, a feeling that creates. Besides genetic determinism
and environmental conditioning there is Mankind that acts,
thinks and loves and consequently determines himself.
He evolves.
Moment by moment, while he loves and while he hates, while
he creates and while he destroys, while he despises and
while he esteems, he creates his own destiny.
Health is freedom for the soul, a force that beats and transforms.
A place where Thought, Will and Love work for our deepest
Need.
Man is body and soul mixed with a spark of God.
What belongs to God returns to God.
Of man, only his masterpiece remains.
Recovery is a journey that changes us into wanderers, into
souls that non longer distinguish reality from dreams. Time
and place develop their own profile, their value and their
dignity.
Man that lives in righteousness is a branch of a willow
in God's hands.
Memory is a place where thought enraptures.
Round the corner a low window leads to a precise moment
in time. To air, or to a puddle, to a smell, to a person.
To an elementary frame of signs and relationships that exalt
creativeness of the spirit. Games of hands and feet, of
agility and velocity, of will and desire.
The smoothed stone of a door, where I would beat my hands
when I was a child, taught me how to lose and earn.
The child of the mythic tender age, that gave part of his
apricot stones to a little girl to play with together withdraws
compared to the child of the historical tender age that
would compete with his strength and his possibilities, that
would build his agility in relation to his nature and to
the world he met. And he would change according to that
image and according to what he felt he could be and to what
he could not betray.
Luigi is 40 years old and particularly irritable. He works
for a provident institution. He is divorced and has an eight
year old child and other two children of 2 and 4 years old
which he has had from his present companion with whom he
has been living for many years now in Milan.
He suffers from periodical lombosciatalgie which suddenly
occurred, a couple of months after he had split up with
his wife, with "a strong smarting sensation from his
back to the nape of his neck together with tremor, loss
of strength and a feeling of standstill of the heart".
At that moment the pain was extensive with no laterality.
It would worsen in the morning whilst getting out of bed
and in moments in which he was particularly busy.
He has also suffered from inflammatory spasmodic epigastralgie
for 4-5 years and from extrasistoli.
Luigi IS FURIOUS, he takes off like a rocket, although
he is generally in a good mood. His job consists in meeting
new and different people every day for whom he often has
to solve survival problems. All kinds of people, of different
races, culture and nature that live in every great metropolis.
He is kind, able and honest: available for everyone, but
if he is ANNO[%D and is sure to be in righteousness, he
becomes INCAPABLE OF CONTAINING HIMSELF. He absolutely does
not tolerate INJUSTICE. He always brings to end what competes
him, never neglecting the quality of the work he carries
out, and when he leaves his office, he is always ready to
face "any surprises of life".
He was on Nux Vomica 30 LM for three months, in accordance
with the predominance miasmatic sycosic-syphilitic and with
the characteristic dominating symptoms he expressed at the
moment.
After a while he said to himself
"more motivated and more attentive",
"persistent positive state",
"aware that life is a place of passage",
"the thought of illness and death are no longer in
mind",
"more willing to accept criticisms",
He tells of his wife. And cries.
He has been divorced for seven years now, after three years
of marriage and with a child;
"an open page…",
"a wound",
"great disappointment".
"Misfortune!".
He thought marriage was founded on maturity, but there was:
"lack of sincerity",
"problems disguised hundreds of times".
At the age of thirty, he was betrayed by a woman that after
seven years still remains "an open page". A woman
he had loved, wanted, desired and then lost. He lost her
in the ponds of the soul that could not be filled with harmonious
streams, where love suffers, chokes and transforms and then
disappears.
Illness carries out betrayal, not pain. And it is always
carried out in ourselves. When we suffer, we pay. We pay
with Life, Health, Beauty, Justice and Love. The light of
our lamp leaves every room, strengthened or dull according
to our choices and to how much we are willing to pay for
ourselves.
Luigi does not love his companion. He did not choose her:
"she could have been any woman, in that moment, my
problem was only a physical problem,".
Luigi hates this woman:
"she obstructs the relationship between our children
and my other child".
Luigi is furious and sometimes
"he is afraid he will kill her"
Luigi has
"a great need of essential things"
but he is also frightened to act and
"to lose everything".
Luigi lives in Milan where he works and where he has three
children with two different mothers. He would like to return
and live in a small town in the Umbro-marchigiano Apennines
on a hill between land and sea.
Who is Luigi?
"Like a house in the country, the soul stands still
at the top of the hill and discreetly recalls a glance.
The soul, protected, not so much by the trees than by a
subtle fear that prevents one from leaving the comfortable,
but yet chaotic asphalt, to head for the white road that
takes to the open space outside the door. Up here, I already
know, observation is completely different. And yet, I hardly
ever come. And hardly ever do I enter the house to take
a look around the big rooms. The rooms of my memories. They
still remain, eternally, in darkness and ruminate over the
same air. But sometimes, sudden thunderstorms , like those
of the afternoons in August, come and brush away boredom,
blowing in new air; so does the sun, sometimes it comes
out from behind the clouds and passes through the walls
and drowns the rooms and disperses the black soot of absence.
In such moments I have the impression I can see a pair of
socks in faded sandals hanging out on the banister together
with a pair of trousers, and a little white hand like a
candid face that seeks the swallows' nest underneath the
balcony. The memories of our childhood are like a belch
after having sucked: it is awaited and a lot is done to
cause it, in vain; until it arrives crashing and surprisingly.
I was born forty years ago in an old house (just in time,
the impoundment of the puerpera of public health was near)
in the Umbro-marchigiano Apennines.
I spent the first four years of my life there, among thousands
of sounds and thousands of sweet, strong and faint smells.
All truly real. Cuckoos, woodpeckers, flocks, lambs, cows,
pigs, hens, chicks, the wind, the rain, bells, bellwethers
, voices…the smell of hay and mint, the smell of manure
and flowers, the morning air and the soil, the smell of
boiled cauliflower, the smell of beetroots and apples….apples.
My bedroom was the "apple room" that is how it
was called, I do not know why the harvest was kept indoors,
but anyhow, I could smell sweet apples while asleep.
Babies are nice to hold and to put in their cradle and it
is even nicer to be a baby. After dinner we would have evening
gatherings, our neighbours would come over and we would
sit in front of the fireplace for the rosary (all of it
and all the litanies in vulgar Latin), my mother, holding
the rosary beads, from time to time would tell off the inattentive
chatterboxes (in doing so, she would raise her voice which
always made me jerk). We preserved this habit for a couple
of years after we had left the farm house, until we were
all a bit older and until the television stole from us that
neat and clean space so intimately ours. Once the rosary
was over, the real "evening gathering" would start:
story telling. I do not remember any. But I remember myself
in someone's arms with my sleepy head hanging on a side
and my mother's voice saying "take him upstairs, he
has fallen asleep". In those arms I was taken upstairs
into the apple room where my sleep was accompanied by the
sounds of voices and laughs from downstairs. I do not know
exactly what my life was about in that period because the
memories are only fragments of single episodes and I cannot
remember them as a harmonious whole, differently from the
period that follows. Painful moments are well fixed in mind
(the fall in the ditch and the head wounds, chilblains,
the fall out of bed when I was a year old) and events such
as my sister's birth but also the most meaningless things
(apparently). But if I go back with my mind to such moments,
I absolutely cannot find the feelings I felt at the time,
but only the environment, the climate, the atmosphere in
which those episodes occurred. Perhaps I'm deceiving myself
but I do have the impression that the period lived relatively
regards me, I know it is mine but it is not present. A flower
that once was a seed no longer feels the dampness and darkness
of the soil, but the sun and air that rouses it. Anyway,
I think that period of my life is important because of the
environment in which I lived in and the air I breathed.
The episodes are secondary; perhaps they have signed me
in some way but they haven't determined me. It is the awareness
of being part of a story, of a land, of a family, and not
part of events occurred by chance. In fact, as soon as I
left the farm house and went to live in town, I realised
I had experienced an abandoning . "All of you spoke
so well about Camerino, but as far as I'm concerned, it
is nothing special" I would say to my mother holding
her underskirt.
One evening, when I was five years old, I ran down the stairs
and out of the front door and once round the corner, I entered
a shoemaker's shop and sat on the first knees I found available:
the first and last time I ran away from home, in the sense
that I never returned. The shoemaker, Antonio, lived on
the same floor I did and he became a good company. I remember
the long walks, the cinema, the ice creams, the hours spent
in his shop singing songs and listening to political discussions.
Then suddenly Antonio's wife died and he was no longer himself
and disappeared. Another abandoning with no explanation.
I believe in what I live because I live in innocence, but
reality seems to be misleading. Here is where interior knowledge
begins: there is an immutable truth and it is inside of
me. I learnt to love truth during my childhood. I've discovered
that there is Another person to whom I belong and from whom
I can leave. I can see what I have told and interpreted
with more detachment and more closeness together. Detachment,
because now I feel less involved, closeness because I have
started to abandon the fear of feeling nostalgic which always
hides a lack of something. Basically, childhood is the most
delicate period of our lives because it is experience without
filters and that is why it is the most real. During our
childhood, experience is really achieved because everything,
including pain, represents a gift. The memories impressed
in my soul represent continuous changes, crucial moments
of growth, sometimes so strong like the recent ones, that
brings to bits our balance. I cannot deny having had a calm
childhood (and youth) as there have not been any strong
events that may have bought to bits my balance(proof of
the genre, but I had that later on).
I should go to that house on the hill more often and enter
it without fear, and think, there, in its rooms. It would
surely not mean not improving. On the other hand, I do not
believe that, the evangelic invitation to return being a
child to enter the Kingdom, means this. But I am sure it
is an invitation that invites us to return to a state of
pureness in order to allow us to welcome Life. Last summer
I was in the town where I was born and I took a look around:
the round mountains caressed the clear blue sky, the breeze
caressed me, the flowers were still there and were happy
of the soil. Everything had a voice. I was so surprised
that I opened my eyes wide and I spread my arms; everything
had already been seen thousands of times and yet it was
as if I had just come to life. Tears came rolling down slowly
and my heart, without pain and without emotions, opened
itself to God and thanked him"(7.5.2001)
Luigi's parents are farmers and so were their parents.
He has a great sense of the family and a strong attachment
to his land.
He has been a patient of mine for about three years now.
At the beginning I seldom visited him. In the last year
and a half I have been seeing him once every two months.
His clinical process is characterised by an alternation
of incandescent psycotics and depression with major trimiasmatic
balance. That is why he fluctuated between Nux Vomica and
Lycopodium.
In the last months the irascible phases occurred at home:
he reached points such as
"great anger"
"violence"
"I cannot stand it any longer!"
"something has happened…"
"it either is or is not!"
He made clear many things.
"I should have done it before!"
"I have regained a sphere of my competence"
"as clear as dawn, things we also deny to ourselves
have arisen".
"I have confirmed my availability to our story, to
our family, but….."
He stayed alone for a week at his parents' and has decided
to write them a letter in order to explain many things.
"I feel enthusiastic about living my life in a different
way".
"I have discovered there is a project on me".
"I have discovered I have responsibilities and it is
great not to be afraid".
Luigi is a mountain farmer that wants justice for his life,
and asks for it furiously.
He has been hurt several times but he has never abandoned
himself. He is still there searching for his God. He only
has to cherish Waiting and this is something everyone should
do.
He needs to write other letters and needs to return in other
rooms with different clothes and hearts. Clear things out
and conquer Truth.
Truth, not lies. Lies are against ourselves, they represents
the betrayal of ourselves. In them we are the worst part
of what we could ever be because they leave us no peace,
but war.
Luigi starts accepting his responsibilities and is no longer
afraid of them. He sees his weakness, he accepts it, he
learns to love and transform it.
Luigi is taking a great interest in a "project"
he feels Someone has planned on him. The religious aspect
of his life is deep and wants to grow because it needs to
be fulfilled. He starts thinking that perhaps impossible
choices do not exist and that each choice only has its price.
Such awareness is the starting point of any possible healing.
If nobody can do for us what we need to do for ourselves,
it is obvious that, who wants to live and fulfil themselves
have no other choice than rolling up their sleeves and start
cherishing every moment of their existence. No longer slave
of reason, of feelings and of others' will but responsible
for themselves and for their Masterpiece.
Freedom begins with small steps and it is conquered while
growing because it thrills us and it alights us, and we
learn to love what we can be and must be. But it costs something
that we are not always willing to give away; convenience,
laziness, vanity, narcissism, unconsciousness, cynicism,
anarchy, hatred.
This humanity is deeply ill, that is its problem.
It does not love and does not know how to.
A deep bloody wound in a sea of mediocrity, of vanity and
violence that passes through the thin parts of the soul
and it is consumed among thunderstorms and more and more
manoeuvred, indecipherable and complex, and it squanders
its possibilities of reaching God.
Luigi has eyes to see, he has heart and strength. His soul
is already up there, on the hill and it will probably take
there all the rest, in a way or another. His vital principle
is directed towards Its truth and this is a possible way
of healing.
Suffering, like any other experience, has its sense, its
dignity and its reason. It is a great sculptor. Like Time
and Love.
Memory is a scar, an altar, totem, a stone that traces the
path and that just simply helps us not to lose our way.
