“I don't have time”: how many times have we repeated this phrase or heard someone say it?
The main reason we don't have time is that we accumulate so many possessions, affections, obligations, desires and ambitions that we feel compelled to dedicate ourselves to it every single day.
Having a home, a job and lots of friends, for example, will greatly reduce our free time. This is because possession enslaves us, leading us to act out of obligation, not out of choice.
Let's imagine for a moment that we have to move to another city: how many goods would we like to take with us, and how many of these will we have to do without to prevent the suitcases from exploding?
The essential lives within each of us, in our memories, in our thoughts: the essential is ourselves. Everything else is pure selfishness to which society has accustomed us since we were little.
There is this story that my grandmother told me some time ago. Of her who was close to marriage with her great love, who was later my grandfather, and of his family who searched far and wide for a photograph of her to deliver it to a maara in the country so that she could curse them and separate them for always. Fortunately, my grandmother, and despite her beauty, had only been photographed a few times.
The maare, village witches and mysterious women, were therefore nothing but great bitches. They destroyed marriages and bent men to their will. They drove them crazy, they made them worse than soulless puppets. They even managed to force them to have feelings: a drop of menstrual blood in the coffee was enough and the game was done. Imagine how many poor males have been ruined by the unbridled power of women.
How bad, what fear.
But it is something that sounds quite familiar to me, this of hatred towards the female gender. The idea that women are evil has been around since the dawn of time, and it is not necessary to bring up the history of witchcraft to prove it. It seems that the woman instigates to sin regardless: it is something inherent in her forms, so most say, in the sharp look or in the refinement of her intelligence. Whatever you touch becomes bad, dies, withers. Here in Sicily to say, and this is a land where we do not send things to say eh, here we say them exactly as they are without any fear, here in Sicily until recently women with periods were prevented from touching their plant. “You will make them die, you are unclean”, they said. We are daughters of the devil, not for nothing: we bring life and, if we want, even death.
But isn't this the ideal context, the one that sees us women as inferior beings but endowed with extraordinary abilities of manipulation, the ideal context in which to turn in our favor what instead would like to demote us? In Sicily, fifty years ago - and perhaps still today - women had no other function than that of procreating and nursing their own children and those of others; clean the house, serve the men of the family, keep your eyes down and cancel your identity within that of the father, brother, husband. It was like that for all women, but only one category was saved. That of the witches. Essential figures within society, they interceded between earthly and out-of-control things, and were just one step lower than the priests, but they were much, much more fearful.
The Sicilian maare were women who were not satisfied with living by inertia, who did not passively accept destiny and instead tried to change it, with magic, spells, prayers and all that was in their possibilities. And they had no scruples, yes, but who had scruples with them?
From the mythological Circe to the girls burned in the fires of the Inquisition, passing through the seas of the South and ending with me, the witches have been the resistance in a society that has always looked at women with distrust and superiority. And that's why I'm not ashamed of my identity as a witch. Indeed I want to tell you all here, in black and white.
Someone will tell you: "It went like this."
No, we wanted it to be like this.
And regarding that strange theory of what you want and never is, I really heard my deep requests speak for once. The wounds close, it takes a while but they close. Those of the skin all close. Those of the mind, on the other hand, reopen at will when you least expect it.
Pursued and pursuers have the same fears, they run away from themselves and chase themselves. To flee always in the long run short of breath and to wait too long you end up getting tired of what you expect. Then there is a moment of distraction in which we both stop and we absurdly realize that we are already too far away, far too far away, really too much now to recognize each other.
I have never had the nature of someone who chases. I have always let go of those who did not want to stay. I distance myself from those who have always been away. It seems to me such a foolish tactic to try to walk away to see who is behind it.
I prefer those who stay to see if I am staying too and I am serious. Those who say they love us should be tested in this way. But I was able to wait from afar, to wait even for what never arrived. Today, however, I no longer want to wait for anyone, I want someone to wait for me. Someone I will not disappoint, because when he wants me I will already be there. And I also put away all that great fear of losing people.
Over time I have learned to believe in a pinch of fate. It is not necessary to hold on tight, just take care of the essential and the essential is simply what we are not willing to lose.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 