Around India in 240 days
Journey Between Cultures and Symbols of India: From Exploring Rajasthan to the South, the Rediscovery of the Feminine and Change
Exploring India “face-to-face” first led me to Rajasthan where I had already lost myself in those women’s faces that knew how to make the world their color, no matter what they did or had to be.
Those women sitting and waiting, sometimes hidden by a veil, always shrewd when the gaze fell on them.
That was how the acquaintance with these women began. And gradually I had more and more need with my inter-congregational community to move further south, to see the reality of other states as well.
To date, it has been 8 months of my stay in India and I have really traversed it from the far north to the south. I have been with my sisters in villages as well as in big cities, including Bangalore .
Question after question, playing and joking with each other, I understood the different meanings of those signs they carried to the world of which we know only the Hindu third eye and which not all of them carry, especially the younger generation and non-Hindu women.
Today, the world needs signs, and they are also the ones that Spazio Spadoni has decided to bring through the spread of the Works of Mercy
Hindu, Muslim, Christian women who value their culture, sign, symbol and being a woman:
- Wearing flowers on the hair, a ring on the toe, the sari in different ways depending on the taste for beauty but also knowing how to enhance oneself. Sari which in the traditional way is just cloth to be wrapped to the body with the help of a dressmaker’s pin. It is not about the commercial saris! A touch of women’s hands. Women who can touch the heart, enchant with little
- Temporary, natural tattoos without stings that last for months with the skillful art of ‘poultice of herbs and spices handed down through the centuries to symbolize celebration. Women who know how to draw poetry on their hands without tatoo catalogs. And also at the entrance to their homes. In the South many women draw there on the pavement flowers made with white chalk. They create them because they are the light of the house and so they write it to the world
- To care for the generation and feel responsible for it. I had the grace to witness how mothers, all with the same demeanor, outside in the open air, shower and soap their babies, put oil on their hair, prepare snacks with their own hands. This really made me feel like the mom, the woman who is mom
- Trying to be the change they want to be as the great Gandhi said. With the new victory of Sonia Gandhi and her children at the political congress, one cannot help but think that women can be the face that changes India
- No matter the traditional culture, young girls from the most modest families leave their state of India to study to be that change. They dress the freedom, the dream as the youth of today.
India is changing. It is no longer about nationalism or Hindu radicalism. It wants to give confidence to young people and especially to women who have always been at the top of a patriarchal and macho society.
This continent, in which Spazio Spadoni cannot miss, has many flags, each state its own, and languages, in which even the variant of a vowel determines the uniqueness of ‘one over the other.
It is the country of mystery, beauty, charm and ‘art, love of nature and music. And above all, it is the continent where the word mercy goes very much with the hearts of these women with whom my community wishes to be on mission.
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The residents of Spadoni Space are wont to repeat:
“Let us enter OPERAM! And let us flood everyone and everyone with works and say.
God’s Mercy is at Work
And we always respond!”
From today start using our motto. When you greet, when you rise, when you meet, when you do and share a Work.
Let’s build and cross the network of OPERAM together.