My dears,
After a long time of silence here I am today wanting to share with you a reflection arising from my experience of the practice of generosity.
As I often recount, I come from a family of humble origins in southern Italy, and all four of my grandparents have always had a solid and deep connection with the land, nature, simple food, and rural traditions.
During my childhood I spent a lot of time under their care and I remember well how much the repetition of proverbs and sayings was their usual way of conveying that folk wisdom confirmed by their life experiences.
One of the teachings that surely influenced my upbringing the most was used by my maternal grandmother to repeat it often.
When I was given food and especially when she noticed in the presence of others my desire to “have it all to myself,” she would gently admonish my hint of childish greed and avarice by reminding me that “all mouths are sisters”.
These simple words were an invitation to share, to give, to become generous to another not as a duty but as an act of sisterhood/brotherhood.
I was thus not being educated to give with the interest of a future exchange, a give-for-take, but I was being urged to give as an act of connection.
The other, my grandmother meant by those words, including the “stranger,” has like you a mouth that although aesthetically different from yours is after all your sister/brother. That mouth and that person like you shares the primary need to be happy and therefore to be not only “fed” but nourished with good and desired things.
Today as an adult I find it particularly interesting to note that this call to the practice of generosity, and to a selfless generosity from the heart, came not from a culture and tradition of “material abundance” such as we experience today, but rather from such humble and simple people who literally went hungry.
Many of them were farmers, like my grandparents, who before the economic boom of the 1950s, really experienced misery and poverty. They lived in precarious conditions, in tiny houses crowded with ever-hungry offspring, without running water, electricity, heating, and where lack of basic necessities was the order of the day.
And so today I wonder: is it not precisely the experience of “lack and so little” that has led this culture of such humble origins to discover in giving and sharing that one true treasure, which no one can ever take away from you and that in sharing even grows, that is spiritual wealth?
Because when you really have so little, it is difficult to give and share starting from the head. The mind full of worries and fears about the future mostly thinks about its “return,” and often what it gets stuck on.
I believe, in fact, that one is capable of giving and sharing without expecting anything in return, only when the giving is an act that comes from the heart, from a deep feeling of trust capable of persuading the doubting mind that even that little is actually still enough and sufficient to be shared.
“All mouths are sisters.” Simple words and for me a very profound truth. They indicate that the path of true generosity is not traveled the moment one follows the opportunistic logic of give-for-take, but only if one ventures into the magical territory of belonging, brotherhood/sisterhood, the same ancestry.
Only then does the gift become a true gesture of reaching out to the other, in which I consciously choose a “familial” relationship with the other even in his or her indecipherable and inescapable diversity, reminding me that, at our core, we human beings all bleed red.
“All mouths are sisters": mine, yours, hers, his, may speak distant languages, have different shapes and colors, divergent habits, but they are all part of one big heterogeneous family. And each sister/brother-mouth, like mine and yours, wishes only to be happy.
There are so many moments in daily life when I notice a feeling of insecurity growing internally, when the thought of future worries and the fear of not having enough begins to water and grow the seed of avarice and greed. And it is precisely in those moments where I consciously train myself to practice generosity. Because it is precisely in those moments that I want to remind myself that giving, the true sharing that comes from the heart is always an act of trust and abundance: I am ready to give from the heart not because I expect something in return, but because I feel and trust that even what little I have is enough and always will be enough.
And these feelings of “belonging and abundance” are for me the only true treasures worth cherishing, that wealth of soul that does not come from material abundance and the fear of losing it, but comes from the wisdom of the heart and its trust in Life and eternal Providence.
Your sister-mouth, Maria-Lucrezia
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