Spring

With april comes the beautiful season: beautiful not because the weather is always good, on the contrary, Spring is often rainy, but it is the season in which nature is reborn in our hemisphere and every day shows the appearance of one of its various riches, all beautiful. and surprising, new, even if we seem to have seen them many times before. The rebirth of nature after the melting of the snows, or after all nature has been in silence, almost passive, naked even if still covered in old garments that have become sad with the winter, communicates life to us, wants to awaken the desire in us. to live, opens up horizons of light for us. Last year we lived the Spring with the anguish and the weight of confinement, with the fear of evil. Right in the heart of that "black" time, closed in our homes, if we could lean out of a window and see at least one tree that put out its leaves, we had a balm in our hearts and we could sing. The beauty, even so small, of what we could see made our day happy. And for human persons these little joys are necessary to live.

We have to draw a great lesson from it, summed up as follows by a sentence I read: "Beauty is what makes us feel good". It is something that cannot be quantified and that cannot be circumscribed, it cannot be grasped or possessed: it is what most contradicts common thinking, due to its gratuitousness, its approach to waste, yet it is what is most sought, perhaps the only thing that manages to stop us and make us "lose" a few seconds, in a life in which we believe that our time is so precious as to chain us and not allow us to let our hearts wander. Sometimes beauty is given as a vast sea, calm or tormented, or a high mountain, sometimes as raindrops, a great symphony or a small solo, a large building or a pearl. But it is not the quantity that fills our arid and thirsty heart, but a drop of beauty, in its various forms. Beauty touches all our senses and no physical or even mental impairment can prevent it from reaching us and giving us its elixir, the one that makes us feel good.

The only ones who can prevent the arrival of this balm, given to us with so much prodigality by the Creator, but also by our own fellowmen, are ourselves, when we close ourselves absorbed by ourselves and by what we want, without looking at what we receive, making ourselves unable to enjoy the beauty that is offered to us in the heart of the hardships and sufferings of life and refusing something that could sneak us out and put us in an open relationship with our fellow men and with God.

However, we know that, for being totally free, it is not without price. Without beauty everything becomes overwhelming, even the most splendid panorama or the most beautiful palace or the tastiest food. We are in fact the ones who open the door of the black hole of our presumed empire, in which we hole up, to beauty; it does not break down the doors, it knocks and presents itself, but if it is not accepted it remains hidden behind an ugly mask: our senses guided by our will have this power. I seem to have to say that sometimes, guided by a judgment that does not seek the good, we delude ourselves to find beauty in what is not beautiful. Here too, the litmus test is "what makes us feel good", not what we like and what can deceive us, tickle a fleeting well-being in us, a satisfaction without a future, but what allows us to live in peace with ourselves .

Man fulfills his duty as a creature by trying to be well, but he can be greatly mistaken by placing his gaze on what is not our good, and trading what is true for shiny and disappointing substitutes.

Cesare Falletti

NP April 2021