“Don’t panic!”

Five months ago, in October, I was slowly moving to Italy, not really knowing what would come next and trying to get busy as quick as possible. I wrote a post titled Exercises of finding beauty: work in progress, setting few intentions.

Now that winter ended and spring is dancing at my window, it is time for considerations and some steers in direction.

I cannot hide that it’s a tough time over here: not just myself, but the whole society and economic system seems to fall apart.

Winter has been a time for mourning: morning my grandmother, who  passed away the very next night I came back after a training on alterate states and coma. Mourning the death of my identity as a traveler and a foreigner. Mourning feelings of exclusion and loneliness. Mourning came with tears, panic, feelings of guilt, anxieties and despair.

But mourning came up also with celebration: celebration of sweet memories of these years around the world, celebration for my grandmother’s life and her influence on mine; celebration for the pain who makes me feel connected to human kind.

November and December  passed slowly: I observed my inner critic releasing me from its  embrace little by little. Never like this before, I could hear my own mind and its power: at the beginning it was like someone was shouting loudly in my head, complaining about everything:  the fake candles during my grandmother funeral;  the conditions of the streets; the loudness of people in public transports. It felt like splitting into parts and being unable to find composition.

In January I moved to Rome and things slowly started to get better. The voice got quieter and left space to a roller coaster flow of moods. I found myself bursting into tears  when seeing an homeless sleeping at the station, or parents mistreating their kids. It’s not anger, just a strong sense of sadness that I can’t nor I wanted to contain. This sadness has been there for quite some time, well hidden under layers of things to do, journeys to take, job to find. And I’m dancing with it: not knowing well how much to react (nor how) and how much to sink deep into it.

But lately, I find myself gaining more clarity and better grounding: it’s not entusiasm, just a sense of peace and of surrender. It doesn’t come often- but it is there, sometimes. I catch myself waking up with a smile for a dream I don’t remember. Or finding traces of random beauty in the city. I find myself full of joy when riding the bike into these crowded streets. I love to be here: I feel home, I feel I’m ok, that there is nothing that need to change if not what I want to. And for the moment, this is more than enough.

Mourning my grandmother Elena Santucci in Marconi