Silence, listening, sharing

Each group has its own history, dynamics, positions, movements and evolutions that define its uniqueness. From the whole to the parts and from the parts to the whole, in a continuous game of relationships, inter-relationships and correlations in which every moment says something about the group, of the group and its components.

Living the experience of the groups is always a state of being in which the position of care opens to a multiplication, a sum of individualities that are made up in the group's discourse.

It is an experience of separation, a self-parrying and parrying in front of oneself and the self of the other components, helping to define a discourse of shared desire in which one parries and appears in the group mirroring in an ever-changing and new dimension, always creative and generative. The separation which allow the meet-up is built as a establishment, arranging what has an identity of meaning, setting up a separate space, a part of space in which the individual mixes his experience in the commonality of sharing.

Sometimes it happens that the climate, the environmental and individual zeitgeist, the current weather leads to the sharing of particular moments that become peculiar and unique. The experience of silence can be one of these.

On a silent and almost spring afternoon, before meeting a group I have been working for a few years and that continuously gives gifts of growth and new internal alchemy, during a walk I find myself attracted to a bookshop, or better to say, from a window of an old library a little out of time. You can see the books piled up and arranged to cover all the interior, leaving a showcase full of semi-empty spaces in which titles and colors can be glimpsed from outside. I almost sneak in, called by one of these books, which I buy and take with me on my silent walk, before stopping at a cafe. Before the group-work session, there were still time for a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a look of the book, which, opened at random, gives me words that I perceive precious.

The group-work session unfolds in the following hours, as a space in which silence has its own significant.

A particular silence, which the group manages to share in its narrative description.

A silence that is like a listening space of the internal world of the group and its components, a group space on the group whose participants silently authorize themselves to set up a free space that becomes a ritual to welcome and comprehend also fatigue and suffering. A silence that allows to feel the time, which becomes an almost concrete quality in its flow, allowing the luxury of calmness in the face of the emergence of everyday life and of the daily emergencies. A calm that helps to contain the disorder, almost a defense of the group against everything there is to say, a precious protection waiting for a path on which the discourse can take its place in the alchemy of the meeting right direction, and which can be shared and traveled together, giving space, hospitality and dignity to all the nuances brought by the participants.

This particular dimension is what I call the "speaking silence", a silence that is loaded with that suspension from the didactic concreteness that sets a space which, in the merging of the thoughts, expectations and desires of the participants, allows the articulation of the speech and desire of the group.

While thanking the group for sharing this unexpected dimension, the words which I read in Eugenio Borgna's book “La saggezza” a bit earlier appeared in all their meaning.
"There is no loneliness without silence, and silence is silent but also listening."