Letter of May First
Page from the Diary of Waiting
Today is May 1st.
Once, on this day, the streets would fill with voices, with hands shaking, with steps merging into a common square. Not today. Today I walk alone, through mountain trails and woods still damp from the night.
Nature welcomes me with a silence that is not empty, but breath. The birds sing, the wind brushes the trees, and I walk. Not to escape, but to remind myself that I exist.
It’s a solitary walk, yes. My children are not beside me, even though I see them at every corner: where a root rises from the ground and becomes a game, where the stream murmurs stories I would have liked to tell them.
But this solitude is different: it is full of the beauty of life, because today nature does not judge me, does not reject me, does not accuse me.
Today, nature embraces me. And in this green embrace, I still feel, despite everything, that I belong to something. To an order that does not exclude, to a universe that does not defend itself against me.
And while walking through nature, I understand: the need for community is not a human invention. It is something that precedes all speech.
I see it in the ants moving in a line. I see it in the mushrooms growing around roots, in the trees that weave their underground networks to share support.
Man too was part of this design. But today, he has forgotten. Or perhaps he has been taught to forget.
And today, May First, all this appears even more vividly.
I do not think of work as salary or contract. I think of work as dignity and as connection.
Once, on this day, people came together not under a slogan, but under a shared need: to feel part of something.
Perhaps the squares were exploited. But under those banners, there were faces, hands, simple stories.
It was a day that reminded us that freedom and the Republic were not gifts, but conquests.
"Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on labour."
Not on privilege. On labour. On shared effort, on a future willed together.
Perhaps this is what hurts me most: seeing that even the father, like the worker, has been isolated.
Once, the father was a living figure. Today he is a lost individual, often invisible.
Like today’s worker: no longer part of a body, but a user, a number, an island.
We live in a world that has convinced us that union is an obstacle and independence an absolute value.
A farmer once said, holding a phone:
“Now with the Internet I can talk for free with someone in New Zealand... But afterwards, what is there to say?”
He was right.
We are connected to the entire world, but we no longer know how to speak to each other.
And that’s why today I walk.
To remind myself – and maybe to remind you – that the need for belonging is not weakness. It is nature.
And I, today, May First, among trees and silence, resist.
Not against solitude, but against the idea that it is normal.