A million happy things

- looking at a squirrel running on an electricity wire while driving beneath it
- technology that makes your life easier
- a good tea
- your best friend
- your baby's smile
- finishing a day at work

I had a dream

I had a dream last night. I had a dream that I was excited. I haven't felt that way for who knows how long now. It was one of the best experiences I ever had, since my heart was pounding, I was running everywhere, I was happy, I was moving, I was challenged, I was believed in, I finally found a purpose, something that made me feel alive. One of my teachers was encouraging us to write and I started it and couldn't stop my mind as it was creating beautiful sentences that I couldn't wait to put down on paper. I was rather strange. 

The point is that I woke up. My husband woke me up for some reason. And reality hit again, and it was worse than the night before because this time I had tasted the life, the passion I once felt for things. It wasn't just a memory, something I was idealising and longing for, it was real and now. Of course, in the dream I was hanging out with my usual dream characters: my high school friends, but it was me, and I was putting into writing the spiritual journey I went through so far. The interesting thing was that it was new, what excited me was a new thing, it wasn't something I ever saw myself doing but it was like the best fit for me and it was writing. Now, I don't know how much of that is a prophecy, something I should explore, as when I wake up my barriers and preconceptions play a bigger role, but I am actually here writing on a blog I neglected for too long. But I had nothing exciting to write, while now it feels like there is something sparkling inside me. What is it that I should do? What is it that I could do? Options as well as possibilities are endless but yet I feel so stuck, longing to find what makes me thrive and blossom and living in a soul hell. It's like living in two bodies, two minds, two souls. One of them is thankful for Bella, the baby daughter that filled my selfish heart with love and is changing me every day, she gives me light, hope, love and a purpose. I adore her. She is no doubt the best thing ever happened to me, and it's amazing to realise that she is here, sleeping, and hopefully wake me up tomorrow morning with the cutest and sweetest smile I have ever seen. So it's not that I would change anything. I had to give all my dreams, plans to make space for her, which was a painful experience. But in the selfish Francesca that I still see glimpses of there was no space for love, nevermind for another human being, forget a daughter. So I had to make space. But I made so much unselective space, i threw it all out, I had to be quick so I couldn't tidy things, put them into boxes for future reference, no. It went all to the trash. My hobbies, my passions, my interests, my past work, my studies. Everything. I am like a blank page. As if all that I did was pointless, not really me, since I ask myself: if they were the things for me would have they not lasted? Who knows. But, again, the point is also that I did have this dream. My soul is still able to get excited, I just need to find the key to unlock it. I imprisoned it. Where are you key, what do you look like? May be you passed my way thousands of times and I just missed you since I couldn't recognise you. I'm waiting. I'm getting restless, I know there is more for me somewhere. I know that my next step is out there, I know that the job that would make me happy to leave-my-daughter-at-day-care-for is round the corner. Or is it? I wish I had the answer. And in this it feels like my normal old self all over again. Always wishing to have the answer while I learnt really only when I didn't have one, as my soul was actually searching. So I'm searching. And I feel almost free to do so. 
My biggest opponent, my worst enemy, the only thing that is really stopping me from trying, exploring, living is MY self. It's not even Bella. I mean, the idea of leaving her in day care (see the language I'm using is already biased..) hurts me. I want to be there for her, always. I assume that she needs me, but I think it's more of a mutual thing. I need her too. I'm scared to let her go as that would make me face my real loneliness, my real emptiness, the fact that I am nothing but a mother right now. Or is that actually ENOUGH? Would it help to just learn to BE?

But I did have a dream where I was excited and that light, that thought, that feeling is stuck in my head and won't give me peace, it's giving me hope. And I can only keep actively waiting. 

ready?

I have an hour of laptop battery at the airport of Liverpool. An hour doesn't seem enough to write down all the thoughts that are running through my head. 

I should be ready. Life has given me 4 days to get ready for this moment. Getting ready to see my bestfriend in the eyes without crying. Getting ready to see the dramatic results of an earthquake that some say it could have been foreseen. Getting ready to help, to be there when I will be needed. Be ready to continually realise that I am not the one that could actually make a difference. ONLY humanity together can make a difference. ONLY when humanity continues this dance of love will be closer to what it is meant to be, only then there can be a difference. The dance of love that is the reflection of THE True Love. 

This earthquake has already transformed me, together with the lives of many. But my language needs to change. It isn't an earthquake, it isn't a loss, it isn't a trauma that should define my change, my identity, my life, our life. These are events we can't control, we can't even predict. So what is it then? Could it be our nature, designed by God, that is limitlessly growing, moving, thinking, adapting, evolving, and loving? If it was the event in itself, we would all change in the same way. We wouldn't have people that try to make a profit out of people's poverty. You see criminals trying to steal jewellery from the destroyed houses, selling goods ten times their normal price, just because they can. You see people who are able not to care about the suffering. So it can't be the thing in itself. Like I don't believe that a person who isn't as able to hear, or walk is directly defined by what this person can or cannot do. So what is it?

The beauty of this search of mine is that I am constantly looking for an answer, but I need to live in the paradox that may be the search for the answer is the answer in itself, or the answer is so intertwined in who I strictly am that I can only 'find' it by living, in connection with all the rest of the world who is or isn't looking for the answer. It's us. It's our humanity, whatever that might mean.

I need to learn to sit with this. I am learning to accept the questions that will only bring more and more questions. And be happy with it. And live.

I already feel like I've grown 3o years older. A week ago I couldn't think about anything but my birthday. Since Monday it all feels a different thing. Priorities have changed, life has changed. I have changed, in such a way that I am hoping now to remember the actual day of my birthday, and deeply hoping that on that day I will be doing everything BUT concentrating on ME, MY life, as I would have done in previous years. On my birthday the biggest gift would be to learn to be outside of myself, to get out of this self-centredness to be able to see the humanity of others. To become so vulnerable to let others be vulnerable in their own right. Because I'm continuing to think that it is in the core of our vulnerability that lies our real strength. Someone said it to me once. And for as much as this sounds like a conclusion for somebody else, this is actually the biggest starting point of my quest. A question, a principle that lives with me, in me, that drives my actions, my thoughts and my decisions. And I think it will be the constant principle in my head while I will have the privilege to be in Abruzzo, to see that disaster that I am trying to grasp on the internet. 

I am losing track of my own thoughts, as usual. But I feel more ready. More ready for that kind of thing that nobody on this earth could possibly be able to get ready to live. 

I am here. In the now. A result of my past and the potential for the future that could happen. And in this presence I sit with this question.

A thought goes to all those angels who have walked this journey so far with me, in one way or another. In the good and in the less-good. Humans who have been able to see my vulnerability through this painful process. Humans who have held my hand, sometimes carried me, sometimes guided me, sometimes helping me to fall, sometimes just sitting with me in my pain.

Thank you.

FIRMA LA PETIZIONE- SIGN THE PETITION.

www.firmiamo.it/aiutiaquile

earthquake

My friend woke me up yesterday morning alerting me about 'a' earthquake happening in Italy. In a quarter of a second I realised my bestfriend has been telling me about the mild earthquakes she has been suffering in the city where she lives for university over the last three months. There my living nightmare began. I try to call her straight away. Her phone is off. Panic. I call my dad who gives me his news about being woken up in the middle of the night by the shaking of his furniture, and he tells me my friend is alive. She stayed home the night before, I would say, guided by an angel. Her university home now is destroyed. Only her room is almost intact. Her memories, her 4 and a half years of life, the streets where she used to hang out at night with her friends, the churches art she admired, they are all gone. All day she panicked about her two missing friends. And I panicked to. From 9am to 9.30 pm my crying eyes were on the news, my fingers were typing endlessly to try and link people to the news, to the help, to anything, my ears were on the phone. I managed 3 hours of work, trying to hold my tears and my thoughts in. Nothing.

It was like watching the Tsunami news but this time 100 times worse. This times is places I've lived, people I love, memories I created, my humanity pushed me right in the middle of all of it, leaving me with a sense of powerLESSness and usefulLESSness. My housemate and I spent most of the day trying to find charities to send money to, the trusted links we could sing-post people to, answering calls, sharing jobs, our lives stopped. Italy's life felt like it stopped. Or at least just mine. Whatever happened yesterday, whatever you would think about your future, all was a part of your brain impossible to access. 

This catastrophe has already let humanity blossom out of its own limits. Rescuers looked so small compared to the pile of destroyed walls and pillars and doors, but in their smallness they were endlessly searching for human life to save. And they saved many. One girl after 23 hours who was under her own house, holding her blanket. 23 hours of hell. My friends here in England calling me, texting me, asking me how I was, their care let our humanity grow, their help, their support, their direction in my search to do something useful. Humanity was born in-the-togetherness. But despite individualistic streams, in the midst of a disaster such as this, humanity shows its real self and wins. One mother shielding with her body and saving her own daughter with her life was the climax of it all. It didn't make the earthquake worth it, but it gave all of us a chance to still hope in the future.

quotes from 'Everything is spiritual', by Rob Bell

...the point of the creation poem is that we are not just machines but are creators. We were made to create and rest, not just do... 

'...Everything is seasonal.' 

This looks like it makes sense since the seasonal system is in all cultures/religions/worldview, rooted in the cyclical nature of the Earth.

'History is made of enlightened people who have realised that reality is not just what it is- and people who hold the power and want to keep things are they are.'

In the Bible, in Jesus' mind there was no conception of the spiritual as a separated/distinguished entity compared to the physical.

'...Everything is spiritual.'

powerlessness vs hope

Let's assume that we are powerless, that there are circumstances that we can't control. But I wonder if there are possible ways to work your best in the perimeter designed by our own limits. I'm just looking into an area of Manchester. A young person I care for has just been beaten and left battling between consciousness and unconsciousness yesterday. That was a circumstance I possibly couldn't control, but I wonder if there are ways now for us youth workers (and human beings) to work with people, with his friends, his family, his community to transform this situation into an unexpected good. The only thing I know in this situation is this longing to see, to taste, to share with people the 'hope' I try to still believe in but that continues to hide itself from me and other fellow humans.  Hope wouldn't exist if there wasn't a negative situation you wanted to change, but in circumstances like this I really ask myself what is the point in the hoping: the sense of powerlessness is currently killing hope, but at the same time the longing to see human flourishing makes me restless at the thought of giving this hope up.