Aldo knows how to bring together a farmer’s experience with an artist’s poetic vision.
Staying a few days in the house he built with his hands was a mystical experience, like spending the night in a hollow tree, or beneath a carpet of moss. There’s no heating, not even a stove to keep warm in the moisture of the evening: you need to get by with thick blankets. The morning after, however, when the sunbeams come to warm your bones, you feel fortified.
It works often this way, in the process of coming back to nature. There’s an element of uncomfortableness that evolves into satisfaction. It’s the cold water that wakes up the mind, the flame of the fire that cauterizes all wounds.
While we work on the farm, Aldo tells us abut the order of things. He talks about chakras, visible and invisible energies, tangible and intangible beings.
There’s no method to verify the existence of these invisible forces, nor another able to measure their intensity, but this does not prevent him, and many friends visiting him, from believing in them.
We too, while in this place, are enchanted and open to the possibility that some invisible force may exist. We absorb energy of the fairytale atmosphere, besides his botanical wisdom.
For instance, it happened that people wanted to ruin the landscape with some ugly constructions. He tells us that he heard and saw the Earth rebelling against that stupid idea and the arrogance of some men. He shows us the awakening dragon, furious against those who didn’t respect the mountain in which it was sleeping.
Reality is such a complex entity that sometimes it can become overwhelming. A little bit of magic helps us to explain the inexplainable, to interpret what does not make sense, to lift the subtle layer of fog that stubbornly hides the thoughts we just put in order.
