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Scimparello N°11 - Winter 2023
DREAMING OF A REMOTE ZONE
BY PETRA BARKHOF
I always try to listen to myself carefully when I decide on the theme of the magazine, to understand where my thoughts are leading me, what I feel the need for. It is never a random choice but the ex- pression, at first rather confused and then clearer and clearer, of a state of mind that I do not only experience, but hovers in the air. I just have to try to grasp it and narrate it. Thus, in this issue, I describe the desire of many to unplug, to take a break from commitments, from the city, from tech- nology, from being perpetually connected. The deep need to get away, to find oneself; to be within nature in conscious and joyful isolation, without emails, followers, likes, television. Just silence and contemplation, the slow flow of time. Even a little boredom.
If there were a Ministry of Children and I were in charge of it, I would propose a law requiring every parent, at least twice a year, to live in nature with their children.
I remember a summer long ago when I took a vacation with my son Giacomo and a couple of friends who had a little boy the same age as him. We had rented an isolated house on an island with no elec- tricity or running water. It took only a couple of days for our little ones to adjust to the drastic change, and after a few weeks they had become savages playing hide-and-seek in the dark, recognizing the sound of every animal, running barefoot on the hard earth, picking vegetables in the garden, and in the evenings, on the porch, listening fascinated to us take turns telling some old story we thought was buried in our memories.
I often regret not having offered my son the same exciting experience of that summer again, and I wonder if the next generations will ever experience something similar. Will it always be as it is now, the Earth, a hundred or two hundred years from now? Are we really in time to save it? I hope with all my heart for a great Nature Rebirth Movement and a Friend Infinite that will somehow take us in. Because that’s where we all come from. And that is where, I believe, we will one day return.
