THEThe smell of smoke, often, almost solid, mixed with the lacquers of the furniture, to the fluid substance in which the objects and colors that had been my life were defeated; mixed with the scent of dreams, the sunny days, projects, of exchanges of love that had remained supported on things, I don’t know if I will ever take it off. In the hospital was the first thing they told meafter noting that the intoxication was manageable: “We remove the clothes, they know about smoke“. But they were not only the clothes, they were my thoughts, while I was lying in a bed in the emergency room of Assisi, with a shirt linked by three laces on the back, and a refrain in the mind: “This slender body, which is under the guise of cotton, is now all I have“.
When everything knows of smoke
Together there were various and overlapping images: the flames, the disbelief, the screams, and a voice that from some distant place, but not less true, said: “Rinasco, I start from here”. Behind me there was a day started like many others And ending how you would never want to end a day. It is January 4, in a cottage in the middle of the woodson the last hills of Assisi, the place where I moved four years ago, selling the house of Milan for the love of yoga and nature. At 2 pm, leaving, I do the usual gestures: I leave some food for the four semi -wild cats and for the fox become family member, I put the computer on the table, I arrange the clothes of the day, and then I dress in white for A yogic ceremony. Outside there is a clear and cold sky. I go up to the spiritual community of Ananda, which I am part of, and I stay away from home until dinner time, to the message of a nearby joint to the community: “Look for Giulia, I seem to see flames out of her roof. There is a fire, I called the firefighters“.
Wind and dry air: the fire does not stop
The dirt road of return made flying and praying, and then the truth: there were flames on my roof and in a room. The house was going on fire, And there were wind and dry air that took the fire by the hand And they moved it quickly to the slopes and inside the other rooms of the highest part of the house. Very fast thoughts came: “I have to understand if the firefighters are coming”. They were coming, they answer me on the phone.“What can I not do without?”.
While I thought it, I was already inside the smoke that had now filled the whole house. I was struggling to see, “But I know it to the touch, by heart: it’s my home”, I repeated and I kept myself here and there on the walls. I go up the staircase, I take the computer in the most compromised room, move some coats to the less compromised one. I get rid of and breath. Return: I move other things, I grab a few others. I go out and breathe. I do it a third time, I go out, and I feel fainted. The firefighters and other friends arrive, to support me. The fire seems to never want to turn off. And I’m not well, I finally give up and I make myself to the hospital. It was not easy to find that house, and on the other side it was very easy.
Before this burnt house of the fire I had rented for about ten years a magic wooden house and large windows, a few meters from there. Then I had just bought a house in Milan, where there were my job and the common sense they had taught me to follow, but, immediately, I had had no doubts: that would be my retreat. A boundless view over nature, in front of the Sacro Monte Subasiolinked to Stories of St. Francis. After traveling a lot, that little piece of land was my elective house And the place where I was happiest in the world. But it took the time of the pandemic to say a strong and definitive yes.
The story of a journalist struggling with the consequences of a fire and its spiritual meaning (illustration of Sofia Figliè)
The gamble to leave the city
After the sale of Milan, I remained for two years in the wooden house, with few essential things, while the farmhouse seemed not to want to be sold, nor could I find other houses. In the house I also crossed the infection from the Coronavirusthat I contracted in a very serious form. But not even that test was enough to make me lose gratitude for the exact feeling of having been put back in my place, as a note in the score of creation. The first winter, with the snow in the middle, without more privileges of a tree or a wild animal, was absolutely magical. Then, finally, two and a half years ago, The doors of the farmhouse open, a space built with all comforts and that could host my thingsremained waiting for me in a temporary room in Perugia.
It looked like a fable with a happy ending, and I believe in fairy tales, because I believe in yoga, which is not a fairy tale, but tells of the inexorability with which love is returned to you multiplied. And there is no doubt that the hazard of leaving the city, its progressive and anchored time to sureness of the world, for the circular time of nature, which is repeated and transformed continuously, had been a gesture of love for me . And now? Now I start again, Rinasco from here. I have to follow an earthly and practical road and a high and heart. The first leads me to keep relationships with the technicians and insurance, which I had entered into a year ago and from which I now await results. The other allows me to see through events and to look for bigger reasons. In this, there is the inner path, which has led me to understand in these years that, sometimes, the real force lies in the surrender to what we cannot yet understand, and that it is the plot of another good of ours. And here there is also nature, which taught me that it is the fate of everything to die and be reborn continuously.
The sense of living in a community
Then there is the sense of living in a community, so those of all the others are added to your strengths and skills. And I was literally overwhelmed by a wave of love, Here and from every corner in which my life passed (Even with a crowdfunding dedicated to her, ed.). Immediately I was given home by Jayadev Jaerschky, my yoga teacher and the one who saw, many years ago, in me a yoga teacher, before I even imagined it. He and his wife Sahaja live ten minutes from my house and have a space of hospitality under the one in which they live. Here I will spend the next few months supported by high energy. I certainly lost many material things in this fire, in addition to the roof, completely destroyed, and all the upper part of the house, in which there were a attic and the rooms, most of the personal effects, shoes, shirts, jackets and coats; Part of the books, work objects and memories accumulated in many different moments in my story.
But this is strengthening in me the sense of what can never be lost and gratitude for what has remained. Thus, every time some bureaucratic request opens the doors of the house, now declared unusable, e I repeater from the black rubble pieces of hope intact, small eyes of affectionlike an old handmade blanket, the tablecloth ordered by my mother on the size of the table, the jims of the Himalayas, just a little blackened on the sofa, I celebrate them and put them back to the new one. It is a way to make my home feel less abandonedin an wait for return and new springs together.
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