EDITOR’S LETTER
Recently a dear friend, whose opinion is worth a lot, accused me of having a sad voice in my last words. Choosing to see things for what they are, dear D, without burying your head in the sand, is to be realistic, not pessimistic. I believe in the future. I believe in the strength of my generation and in that newborn hope sung by Guccini in “God is dead”. Because like him I also believe that “If God dies, it is for just three days untile he rises again.”
I leave you the last letter written by Dheli to another dear friend, M. Hoping you want to publish this food for the soul that has a lot to do with the desire to change and improve and little with sadness.
“From my last trip to the East, the third in a couple of years, I come back tired. Only if the time machine existed, could we still define ourselves as “travelers”? It seems that everything is polluted and the air, perhaps, is not the worst of all. I visited the Lamayuru Monastery, built high, in white painted stone and sturdy wood. A white and shiny parallelepiped, perched on crumbly soil, overlooking a basin cracked at the bottom by a river of mud. If it weren’t for that horrendous tar line that follows the murky water over there. Or if you weren’t greeted by a listless monk, with a Nike cap on his head, Suzuki keys in his hand, and an Apple Watch on his wrist. If they had kept the sandals instead of the Crocs. Or if rather all of us were still able to walk barefoot in the world, perhaps finding an answer to the question “why we exist” would seem easier. When I’m out of breath, I repeat to myself: “remember to breathe”. It is my mantra and often leads me to look for high places. No need to conquer them, it is that at the top it seems to me to breathe better, and to see further. On this thin crest of stones, a chörten submerged by colored flags is my refuge. Those tattered clothes, piled up like everything in India, hit my face. They are slaps, not caresses. I grab one, I’m not an expert but they are certainly held together by polyester fibers. Plastic. I don’t want to think about it, I force myself not to, but it seems to me another good excuse to pollute: faith. Buddhism, however, is far older than petroleum derivatives. I imagine those same prayers painted on cotton cloths, the image of the monk a little while ago, who scrolls through the Facebook feed while stamping my ticket, makes every imagination difficult, but I don’t give up.”
And I see a luminous, albeit difficult, path to follow. Isn’t this then, what going to the mountains mean?
Chiara Guglielmina
