Mountain buttercup or botton d’oro, gorse, pulsatilla alpina, dandelion, saxifrage, helianthus, alpine poppy. They seem to be just the names of seven flowers that are blooming in the valleys of the Dolomites at over 1500 meters at this time. But that’s not enough. If the horizontal sea and with this line connecting heaven and earth says life is a journey, the mountain speaks of courage because it hides the horizon to put you face to face with the sky.
Horizontal and vertical are the coordinates of the mind: journey and ascension.
When planning holidays we choose between the sea and the mountains, as if they were two ways of saying what the soul and body need to rest. During a long walk, I could observe dozens of flowers that make valleys and rocks shine. The ones I mentioned earlier are for yellow flowers only. The petals take on the colors necessary for pollination, yellow is particularly attractive to bees, sensitive to its luster. I was amazed to see the variations of this yellow, different for each flower: evolution never neglects beauty. That beauty necessary for happiness, as Baudelaire wrote: give up boredom and deep sadness / that make life difficult, / happy who glides through life and effortlessly / understands the language of flowers and silent things! What does that mean? found the usual of poets?
Today, much of our unhappiness depends on our abandoning non-consumptive contact with the things of nature. When was the last time you touched, smelled, looked at flowers? These variations of yellow gave me joy again and reminded me of Laura Imai Messina’s beautiful book, The Hidden Lives of Colors, which tells of Mio, a Japanese girl gifted with an absolute eye that allows her to perceive colors recognize and name events of the soul. Working in a pigment lab, she’s best at finding the right ones for people, settings, and events, using quirky names like Sneaky Peek at a Pitcher for a light blue, or Closet Blue for her favorite color. Mio lives in a symphony of shades that allow him to give back to people what they have lost, especially Aoi, a boy who not only runs a gray funeral home but is also color blind… Mio teaches Aoi to the world see through colors and Aoi teaches Mio not to be afraid of death.
As I read the novel, I thought that there are too many colors that I cannot name and therefore cannot see.
I started thinking about what I had previously neglected (names are always the result of healing) and so wonder healed the sadness Baudelaire speaks of. To be amazed again, it is enough to welcome the world and its wonder, for which we no longer have the time and patience.
Chandra Livia Candiani in The Silence Living Thing tells a fascinating story of the Buddha: he spends seven years in the forest studying himself and meditating. It contemplates the truth of suffering, its causes, its cessation and the path to liberation and awakens. So get out of the forest, towards the men. He meets a man who, seeing him beaming, comes up to him and asks, “Are you a god?” “No,” replies the Buddha. “Are you then an angel being?” “No,” replies the Buddha. “A demon?”. And to his umpteenth denial: “So you’re a man like everyone else?” “No – the Buddha replies – I’m awake”. An adjective that becomes a name, a quality that leads to a total transformation of the subject and his life. I like that the Buddha is a human and not a god or angel, and at the same time he is not really just a human, but an awake, blossomed human.
Awake as a synonym for flowery: bright, colourful, open.
If we go to Greece we are reminded of the story that Plato uses to define awake those who come out of a cave and, having seen the light of the sun, come back to warn those who have remained in the dark, that shadows are not reality, just images. The millennia-old wisdom of great cultures reminds us that man is fully awake.
This year I wanted to greet my students by commenting on a text that caught my eye recently: Jesus said to his disciples: Be ready, your clothes wrapped around your waist and your lamps lighted; Be like those who wait for their master when he comes back from the wedding, so that when he comes and knocks, they open immediately. Blessed are those servants whom the Lord finds awake on His return; Truly I say to you, draw your clothes around your waist, let them sit at the table and go on to minister to them. And if he finds them like this in the middle of the night or before daybreak, blessed are they! (Luke 12).
I wanted to convey to them that summer vacation time (which literally means emptiness) means only when that emptiness means stillness, that is, openness to reality. Culture has the task of awakening man from the slumber into which he falls when he neglects his own inner life and allows himself to be seduced by proposed or imposed illusions and mirages. Jesus also lets the blissful, happy life coincide with the waking life. Indeed, the servant’s role reversal is amazing: the lord returns from the wedding (the event which in biblical language signifies the relationship between God and man) and begins to minister to the servant whom he found awake as if willing he say that life he puts at the service of those who keep their eyes open. Whoever awakens goes from servant to master: my whole life becomes available to me only when I begin to serve it, that is, I am open to receiving it and responding to the present. I therefore proposed some tasks to my students to be awake and therefore blissful and to avoid that the sleep that leads to the end of the holidays being empty and not full of what one has received in the inner space.
Being awake is the secret of a happy life: even in everyday life, to those who know how to face reality, we say that I am awake, an adjective that comes from an ancient root that points to the sentinel who watches and protects. To be happy you have to be vigilant, alert, not missing even the smallest miracle of the present, like the yellow that I have found in a single specimen, unlike the multitude of others because it is rare and on dry banks blooming: the yellow of the alpine poppy.
I realized it because I was awake (actually those who searched for treasure with me woke me up) and I wanted to give a name to all the thrillers I would encounter if I were to walk with a little bit more of the world in my heart and in mind returned home to my heart. And indeed, I found myself with a joy that no one can take away from me: to be blessed is not difficult, it is enough not to be distracted or to sleep, to stay awake and to face life in its constant attraction for each of us react things, people, events… Now I know seven yellow flowers and their names, hearing them speak in their brilliant alphabet has confirmed to me that in order to bloom, to be blissful, I need to be awake. What I am recounting is not the sentimental attitude of those who have time to lose, but a bold challenge to our time, which is always on the move, scattered, noisy and never really on vacation, ie open, and actually even on vacation can’t really rest because reposing means placing the ego back into itself if who knows where it ended up. Our failure to appreciate the reality we face is the root cause of sadness, boredom, and despair. Today we start taking a vacation within ourselves for a few minutes and then look for someone or something to wake us up each day. And our holidays will be blissful, if only for a color we’ve never met.