What a splendid time to be alive!

This morning my dear friend Giuseppe Conoci posted the following:

AN IDEA THAT CAME TONIGHT
We need to find in pain a key element for creating community. Don’t keep it locked up inside, let alone, lock ourselves up in it. Instead, we should share it, write about it, tell a story, sing about it, complain about it if necessary. I want pain no longer to beshamefully hidden, I don’t want it to be held tightly as a private fact, because it is an illusion to think that it is. It affects everyone, sooner or later our train will pass through that station, sooner or later every individual will be touched by it. You might as well equip yourself then, prepare to learn from your experience. Tonight while I was wandering around in these thoughts, and thinking about asking the mayor of my town for a place where we could meet and share our human pain of living, the idea came to me. I am tired of delegating to institutions, to municipal administrations, almost always encountering their lack of attention, also tired of delegating to listening and caring professionals. I want to propose a simple, direct action in favor of the community in which I live, Otranto. Since I have a bookshop, and also considering that this bookshop bears the name of AnimaMundi, so by vocation it is interested in the soul of the world, once a week, for two hours, I will make it become a listening point for pain in all its forms. Anyone can participate,  participation will be free and open to citizens and tourists passing through. There will be no listening professionals, but people who can tune in to their own pain and the pain of others and give it a voice. The first meeting will take place on Thursday, March 26, at 5 pm.

If we find it difficult to begin, because the pain is stratified in us and we have learned so well to pretend we don’t feel it, then to thaw us out we will ask for help to a few pages of a book, read a poem, listen to a piece of music. I know, one day a week, for two hours, is little, almost nothing. But it can be a start, a small start. If in every country or city small centers of listening to pain were created, I believe that our joy would be more alive and the whole community would benefit. We must stop thinking of pain like a heavy, sad or gloomy thing. It becomes so when in pain, the air no longer circulates because it has been locked up for a long in rooms of the soul where no one passes. On the contrary, when it is authentically shared, it quickly runs towards its opposite, lightness, and joy.

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