Not so long ago someone said to me: think about why you named yourself samurai mama.
I guess like in everything else, there was not only one path to it.
The first clue, it’s my long term attraction for Japanese culture: music, art, spirituality … and their very precise and stoic way of doing things. Around 2018, I began to seek information about samurais and other martial art’s philosophies.
The second lead was my growing interest towards self discipline: cold showers outside , winter swims in the sea, fasting for long periods of time, minimalism as a general rule of living … and those practices were only an external reflection, of the more internal auterities that i decided to face when i came back to my homeland to take care of my family traumas assuming that the troubles in my lineage were also part of me.
But the main inspiration for this name, is my own experience as a photographer.
When you take photos of someone in their daily life, you are integrating naturally your masculine and your femenine energies: to take a photo you have to dare, to get closer, to push boundaries, and at the same time you have to be completely open, gentle and receptive towards what you photograph. It’s like a play, or a dance, where you are both a tiger stalking and a gentle hand holding a feather, embracing what it is as it is.
Eventually this intuition became even deeper when i integrated it with my experience as a mother. What I thought was my greatest weakness, my deep sensitivity, my complete vulnerability in front of others’ emotions and moods… was actually my greatest strength.
Finally i understood my true nature: how much i loved everything and everyone i photographed, how easy was for me to feel them and to see their beauty… and nonetheless, i realized how difficult it was to express it, mainly because people feels uncomfortable when you show them love and praise, they think is fake, or idealistic, or unrealistic, or that you have ulterior motifs… Deeply inside of them, they dont feel worthy of attention.
To love just for the sake of loving it requires to be brave, to go outside of the conventional social interactions… to make someone feel seen, heard, appreciated, important, necessary… even if you only spend a brief time together, that encounter will be printed in your heart forever.
And that is what it means for me to be a samurai mama: to be fiercely in love with this world and its people, to be a warrior that cuts the ties with anything that is not part of that feeling of AWE.
I’m so grateful for all the people that showed me their grace and their pain… i don’t own nothing in this life, these instants are my precious… they give me life.
I feel this is the end of a wonderful journey where i sought god in the external world… and yes! i can say that i found him, inside every one of you. Today it begins a new phase, where i will seek god within… me.
I’m on my way now.
