panta rei, everything flows
A flooding river have no mercy, the water has no mercy. It just goes bringing anything is not resistant enough, anything that does not know how and where to anchor.
I was only six may be seven, people had to leave their homes and come to sleep at the school. As a six years old child I was excited. It was an extraordinary situation for a small village with less that 3000 people. In my memory it is the river, Ancinale but my mother says was the mountain that collapsed destroying the houses, a landslide, a crack on the houses clinging to the mountain. it lasted few weeks I have a memory of months. it is strange how sometimes our mind select things, the mountain has vanished in my mind but the river is there, crossing the village and protesting its life and freedom.
it took years before I could live/experiment a flood. With a friend, we wanted to reach the farmers which were cut off. We drove for few kilometers in a brown, dirty, impenetrable raising water with our old nissan big and heavy. Nothing of the adventure, apart for the typical happiness of a survivor. Than I realize that a river can be a dull fury, selfish in its obsession and indifferent to any of us, to anything that has not enough strength to stay, to oppose, to say no.
These days I just look at pakistan. where else I could? the disaster is enormous, i cannot imagine how many people are struggling. news says millions.I am not able to imagine millions. it is unthinkable and it is lasting day after day. i sit in my every day life and listen to this and listen to my everyday life situation. listen to people version around their various commitment, listen to the gorgeous and less gorgeous preparation of the electoral campaign. in pakistan as in bosnia the same pace of lies, the same ability to build lies by the various politicians. it is a cacophony, a crescendo of I,I,I (capital letters!). there as here, analysis and promises take the space and the time of action. there as here the water is obscure and dirty, moneys are disbursed and deranged.
I feel pretty useless my current “here”, i know i will face my dirty water and i know i will resist, overcome and survive. i am grateful to the millions of resistant that are doing it against all odds. i am thankful to them and to the ones who care about the others, the ones who usually do other things and now deliver aid, run aid campaigns. it is the immense tragedy of pakistan put side by side with the news about the attempt to kill a cat that give the exact measure of the nonsense. but panta rei, everything flows.
h-vale
