THE NET OF MEMORIES

The smell of the ground, soaked with rain, suddenly reminded me a memory of many years ago; I was about 8 or 10 years old, I was spending my holidays in our country farmhouse and it had just stopped raining…I was happy, picking some wild roses which grew along the drive, to make a beautiful little bouquet for my mother.

Then I got a sudden lump in my throat: I exactly felt as if I was a child again, standing still there on the alley, picking wild roses from the bushes, in my little rubber boots splashing in the puddles, with a hurt full of joy and excitement for being free to go out again, after the storm confinement.

Slowly, unexpected tears fell down my eyes and I got overwhelmed by a belated gloominess, as gentle as a caress, as painful as only certain happy memories can be, their way.

Amazing the soul which can still be moved to tears ... and deeply feel nostalgia.
We all live in a world which constantly forces us to quickness, forgetfulness, shallowness and unconcern. The apologia of “throwaway – way - of - life”: throwaway-people, throwaway-affairs, throwaway-friendships, throwaway-interests.

Welcome back nostalgia. Long life to this slow, viscous, sweet forgotten feeling, arising from going deeper inside ourselves, down into the heart-time, a time with non end and no beginning made from lights, colors, scents…instants…images.
We must preserve with loving care and tenderness our capacity to live this slowness, the eternal essence of every farewell, of every gone-by moment of our lives.

This silent and inner space inside us is a place where past and future no longer exist and everything seems to be out of time, all existing at the same time.

It’s a no man’s land where everything is always present, being everything equally alive and true, where it’s all still happening.
A trick of the soul… which lives in an eternal dimension. A taste of eternity which makes us so alive, giving us the sense of coherence and consistency in a life which no longer flows along a straight line, but in a plurality of parallel and overlapping spirals.

It’s like a net, made of all the moments of our life, all equally present and actual, all reflecting in each other in an endless hall of mirrors which returns to us the image, wonderfully unique and coherent, of what we are.

Pascal once wrote: “All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling”. This is the strength of nostalgia: it has no time, no place, no reason. Just senses, images.