"It must therefore be taken for granted that human curiosity, wandering across the vast expanse of created things, can sometimes come across something that goes beyond natural laws and that brings novelty: consequently, excited by a restless desire to know, due of that unknown element, our curiosity is inevitably captured by a profound amazement. We therefore, here, to dissolve this amazement, to satiate the desire for knowledge, and finally to stimulate another hunger for new discoveries, we have decided to reveal the hidden rooms of nature, decorated with countless images."
- from the volume Monstrorum Historia by Ulisse Aldrovandi, published in Bologna in 1642 -
Nature creates and expresses itself through the fundamental forces of the cosmos, which always act together as in an amalgam. No force is independent and self-contained, as in an orchestra, every single instrument interacts and contributes to the creation of the final work. Every landscape is composed of earth or rock, forged by fire, shaped by water, chiseled by the wind and finally populated by souls. A fire cannot express itself without matter to burn, the air declines itself by inflating clouds and bending trees, a mountain cannot soar without a fiery magma that pushes it towards the sky. Everything is the result of a transformation.
And then there are the kingdoms, with all their inhabitants, in an amazing array of shapes and colours: the metamorphosis of the elements and forces into a vital spirit, the cosmos becoming aware of itself. The next step is questioning.
And man is equally composed of the same matter, the same elements of the cosmos, he is acted upon by the same forces, he is subject to the same destinies. It is placed on the border with the kingdoms and builds bridges, dialogues and relates with them. And if he guards the wisdom of the soul, he learns and grows stronger. If he becomes the guardian of this divine spark, if he becomes the champion of the soul of the cosmos, he will return to it, in supreme greatness.
principle of Buiti Fang, African psychedelic religion.
Gardens and parks, flowers and potted plants are beautiful, but tame Nature is not for me, I love wild, indomitable Nature, where the secret and primordial forces of life and matter forge the visible world. This Nature is the teacher of beauty and wisdom. I admire the strength and courage of those irreverent flowers and those thin blades of grass that break the hard asphalt, I admire their desire for freedom and make a smile of complicity bloom on my lips, and those seeds that run away with the wind to take root and express their beauty in the most unthinkable places. I love those long ivy hands that reclaim urban spaces stolen from the earth. All this is poetry. The big mountains enchant me, but in the same way the small stones of the river. The force of the water is hypnotic, and arcane music for the soul is the wind, and the waves and the flow of the stream. I find the deep dark forest a healing balm and nourishment for my wild soul. All this cancels my borders, internal and external no longer exist.
Nature is like the mysterious laboratory of a mad scientist who experiments with physics and biology, perhaps guided by a grandiose project, perhaps he is groping in the dark, or perhaps he is just playing, with no project. We can't know, mainly because we are not in the scientist's head, and therefore down here, in this material laboratory, everything takes on the charm and flavor of mystery, everything seems to be governed only by the laws of entropy. We just have to fantasize with the most imaginative theories of the highest systems, and with the most convoluted academic gossip, but which in the end are revealed to be only gossip and theories always. Think only of the chaos of religions, philosophical currents, beliefs, myths, scientific theories and anything else the human mind can give birth, but ultimately what do we know? Throughout history, everything that the human mind has generated has always turned out to be limited, outdated, erroneous, reductive, illusory. It would be better not to think, it would be better to dig, because only by digging deep into the lost wisdoms of the ancients could we possibly find some traces of Truth, if only the older a thing is, the closer it is to the point of origin. Those who have seen certainly know more than those who have not seen! And even here the ancients teach: we seek the unreachable, there is no Truth, there is no beginning and no end, but only cycles that repeat themselves endlessly, wheels that turn. This is Nature ! Ouroboros.
According to many philosophies from every corner of the world, reality as it appears to us is just a spell, a magic, an illusion, to be broken and revealed, if we want to understand its essence, to become part of it and live it fully. , inside and outside of us (these are also arbitrary borders). Thus we will understand that Nature is not an abstract entity outside of us, which mussen't be protected and defended like a cute little animal, Nature is us and must be loved and respected, as we love and respect ourselves. Nature should not be defended, it is ridiculous to think this, man will never destroy Nature, if anything the opposite: when Nature's patience is over, he will sweep us away in an instant. We cannot have the presumption of defending anything or anyone, we can only defend ourselves, and we must only understand that the whole world is ourselves!
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I love rocks, stones, clear waters as well as turbid ones, I love trees, I embrace their trunks, I let myself be intoxicated by the balsamic scent of damp and shady woods, I am enchanted by the wild flowers, which grow bold and solitary in so improbables gardens that no human eye has ever looked at them, yet they still shine in their ignored dignity.
I love inaccessible places, severe mountains, the roaring sea, the wailing song of the wind, the crackle of boots as I walk: a path that winds in front of me is like a promise to go, sure to never be disappointed with mine steps, a precious gift always awaits me at the end of the day.
I love lakes, rivers and waters in all shapes and depths, I love atmospheric agents, I am fascinated by the fog, which gives charm and mystery to even the most banal things, I love clouds and their introspective shapes, thunderstorms and their roars that shake the conscience, the snow that purifies the soul, the ice that scratches the senses, I love the seasons that chase each other and the thousand surprises that always reserve changes.
I love nature because I love myself, because I, you, we, are no different from these stones, these trees, the leaves, the frog or the fish, the roe deer or the snake, the cloud or the wave: we are all manifestations of the same energy, of the same strength. Matter is illusion, there is only energy, force, waves and movement, rhythm and harmony.
There is no good and no evil in this realm, there is only transformation, and the beauty of photography is perhaps in this ephemeral attempt, in this poetic illusion of being able to stop this incessant transformation ! Or perhaps to testify it.
I smile when I hear people talking naively about saving or defending nature, man will not save nature or the planet, he will not save anything and anyone, not even his soul, it will be nature to save itself, when we have overcome the limit, simply purging, eliminating the waste that poison it, including ourselves.
We will not save the planet with reason, with good intentions, with our presumption of omnipotence, but only with the heart. Nature must be loved, deeply, intimately, sincerely, with a love that does not arise from an imperative, but from the understanding and joy it can give us, respect and salvation will be the consequence. But love is a feeling, and to the heart, is known, it is not possible to command.)
Taking inspiration from a news story, not even very sensational, I would like to say a few words on the presence and importance of beauty and harmony in our lives.
If we follow the news that is continually presented to us by the media (but it would be better to say disinformation), an impressive quantity of bad and negative news, information, behavioral models, bad and negative thoughts and sensations enter us in a continuous and insistent way. , we are literally stuffed with emotional garbage! Unfortunately we unconsciously absorb all this, it ends up seeming normal to us, and it is not good for us, it does not benefit our happiness or our physical health. Unfortunately it is a situation that I see in our daily lives everywhere, beauty and harmony are important nutrients, like vitamins and proteins, we are not only what we eat, but we are also what we see and feel! Yet every day we absorb so much of that ugliness into our lives that we are now addicted to it, we consider it something normal, obvious, we don't even pay attention to it anymore, and this is perhaps the most worrying thing, or rather ugliness, in all its thousand facets (violence, arrogance, oppression, rudeness, presumption, pettiness and so on) not only do we accept it as normality, but we also go looking for it, almost as if it were a need, and we see it in television programmes, in music, in books, in sport: ugly, bad and violent things are attracting, good things bore...
Returning more specifically to Nature and the landscape, going around our disastrous country, I see a beauty disfigured, violated, debased, almost derided with contempt, I see a wealth wasted, dilapidated, forgotten, but above all I see a lot of indifference and resignation in the face of to all this. To be honest, I also see many positive examples, but they are drops in the ocean, and I often see many disasters, which we try to remedy with even bigger disasters!
But the problem is inherent in us: we no longer know how to appreciate and enhance the beauty that we have around us, every day, and we always think that beauty is elsewhere, in exotic and distant places, we think of holidays in the Caribbean and trips to paradisiacal places, and we don't think that even the daily commute to work could be a small journey, surrounded by beauty and harmony, but we don't see it, we are no longer able to appreciate it! Our lives are unique and precious, why spend them in an open-air landfill that we call an environment, a city or a country?
We often treat our homes as if they were wedding favors, and then as soon as we walk outside we walk through the garbage, without even noticing it. Maybe we dress all elegant and lively, to go and do our ridiculous catwalk in a dilapidated and moribund urban setting. And I'm not just referring to the external environment, often the outside is the mirror of the inside, the outside influences the inside, ugliness, by breathing it, enters inside us, and takes up residence there! We end up becoming ugly in the soul, we risk becoming dry, and in the end indifferent even to beautiful things.
We should go back to looking at the world with the eyes we had as children, when something was beautiful if it thrilled us, if it influenced us with charm and mystery, if it made us smile or intrigued us, while now, with our distorted mentality as "adutli" we confuse priorities: we confuse the beautiful with the expensive, the value with the title, being with appearing, the precious with the unattainable.
Unfortunately, in my daily life, I realize that many people can no longer even see beauty, and if I get excited about a sunset, about a wisp of fog that makes a corner of the city magical, about the shape of a stone or the colors of a leaf on the ground, they look at me with an air of pity, but I feel the same for them!
My photographs are basically a sort of revolt against all this, they are a crusade against ugliness, my personal search for beauty and harmony in what is around me, in simple and everyday things, because this is what life is made of, not so much about sensational or exceptional events.
My photography is a sort of spiritual medicine to be taken via the eye!
I hope to succeed in this, not just for me.
If you like this site and like my work, you can support also offering me just a coffee ...
While reading an interesting booklet on homo selvaticus I came across this phrase which particularly struck me and opened up a sea of questions: "...the cult of trees in places that were already sacred well before the advent of the new religion of the desert".
A fairy tale coming from distant Finland, a land of forests and snow, begins by telling the story of a family who lived in the woods, the father had three children, and each of them had a lucky tree near their home. Now grown up, the boys expressed the desire to finally find a partner, the father then asked the...
At Roccamurata, in Taro valley, a small stream flows, marked on maps as "Rio del Bastardo", its waters descend from the steep ophiolitic slopes of Groppo di Gorro and form a wild, fascinating and at times difficult to navigate environment.
Strength, courage and enthusiasm, this is what a waterfall gives me. They are places full of energy that I would never want to leave. It announces itself from afar, with its unmistakable roaring sound which is a battle drum, it makes the heart beat loudly in the chest and fills the lungs with fresh and crisp air, an irresistible call...
These little pearls always excite and enchant me, drops of dew or rain which on certain days enchant with their dazzle, almost as if they were precious Perudian jewels from the fairies, hastily fleeing at the arrival of the first rays of the sun. I often get lost in a square meter of lawn, and spend endless quarters of an...
This flame arises spontaneously on the slopes of Mount Busca, in Romagna, in a place perhaps not surprisingly called "Inferno", fed by a natural source of gas that escapes from the subsoil. The phenomenon is famous and known as "the smallest volcano in the world".
The flowers in the gardens are sad, like the animals in the zoo, they put showing oneself for an ephemeral complacency of others. The wild flower, which bravely grows in lonely and hostile places, without any attention, it is a fantastic creature: it flaunts elegantly his very slow dance in a wonderfully empty theater. It give to the world a...
In the middle of winter I saw a flower, in a meadow covered in snow, which, against all rules, was enjoying the sun.
Here is a beautiful example of the transformative magic of nature. This small underwater monster, about a centimeter and a half in size, is an Ephemeroptera Nymph, and the very name of nymph already hints at a magical world, where the boundaries between worlds and forms are more labile and permeable than we can imagine. to imagine.
The encounter with an unknown animal which, like a lighthouse in the night, attracts attention with an intermittent light.
You were wild once. Don't get tamed.
Un gabbiano curioso volteggia attorno al mio drone - A curious seagull flying around my drone
Impronte di animali selvatici in Val Pessola - Footprints of wild animals in north italian apennine
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Warnings: everything you find on this site is the fruit of my imagination and my personal opinions, here you will not find news, information, advice, suggestions or anything else, but only and exclusively my personal opinions and the story of my personal experiences. This site is essentially a monologue made public, my personal organizational agenda. No one is required to follow me, to share, to experience, to accept or to believe uncritically. In fact, I strongly advise against doing so.
