I’ve nurtured the desire to see these three great men together for years, since I became part of the big family of the ambassadors of the Third Paradise in 2012, and I felt his symbol “vibrating” within me. All this gained strength when Pistoletto visited us in Finland, with a series of meetings called “Innovation needs (he)art”. And the symbol was with me again in my home country when the themes of Slow Food and the vision of individual health by Franco Berrini from “La Grande Via” (The Big Road) met up close and with concrete plans to see man’s and planet’s healths joined together. We have to realize an internal Third Paradise to be able to create harmony in the world. The connection between the rational mind (artifice) and our animal nature (nature) needs he(art), the human heart pulsating in unison with the beat of the cosmos. The mind at the service of our deep nature can generate virtuous cre-actions when it envelopes our deep feelings and a love for life in all its forms in a single embrace.
(Michelangelo Pistoletto, his wife Maria and Eija Tarkiainen with a group of Finnish and Italian ambassadors in Kuusamo, Finland, winter 2015)
The message by all three of these great wise men tells us of the possibility of the creation of a “new world”, urging us to turn on our individual awareness and sense of responsibility in our daily choices towards ourselves, the others and the planet. The love and the courage necessary to activate ourselves are not to be a moral imperative, but rather a natural impulse linked to beauty.
The “three oaks” lead us in the direction of the light, the true source of knowledge.
The human race feels lost among the thousands of pieces of information it is subjected to. We consume ourselves arguing about facts and opinions, forgetting the essential. What if the answers were already inside us? If each of us already had free access to that source of wisdom which quenched the thirst of our three oaks? A broad mind who has knowledge, but consciously involves the heart and the intuition too, arm in arm with the silent wisdom of its own traditions and roots, is capable to notice the “truth” of the nature we belong to and we are surrounded by; all the way to answering humanity’s basic questions with daily choices. What are our true needs? How do I keep healthy? How do I approach the other? How do we sustain the planet so that it keeps accommodating us? What role does beauty play in our lives?
In making our daily choices – the most effective political act at our disposal – we don’t always need an expert to tell us what is the right course of action because respectful of our health and our dignity and the dignity of our planet. We need to activate our sensitivity!
What our three wise men tell us through their lives and public actions is that each of us can look beyond the usual, overcome the limits of the official knowledge, awake our innate knowledge, so that we are autonomous in identifying what life wants from us. In conclusion, the most important lesson our three wise men are teaching us is to have the courage to follow our visions, realizing them with words and actions.
Image at the top: Ejia Tarkiainen (first on the left) and Franco Berrino in Lapland.
