Author David Bramwell meets Tigrilla, Online Communications Manager at Damanhur, an extraordinary community in Northern Italy whose members have built an underground palace and who believe that plants make music.
BRAMEWELL: How did you end up living in Damanhur?
TIGRILLA: That’s a bit of a story… I’m not your usual Damanhur arrival, which is now through the New Life temporary citizenship program. I came to visit after hearing about Damanhur from several friends and students. I was introduced to a woman that was working on a specific project and when she heard about my unusual background from the arts to technology to spirituality, she asked me if I would come do a work exchange to help launch a new project. When I got back home to Barcelona where I was living, my roommate tells me that she is moving back to Argentina and I have to find a place, so after not finding a new apartment I liked, I decided to pack my stuff up and go. It was only supposed to be for six months, but for some reason I took all my stuff with me… that was three years ago. J
BRAMWELL: What do you most love about it?
TIGRILLA: The diversity, the dreaming, the research, the ritual… the fact that spirituality is intertwined in everything, not just something theoretical. The fact that if you can dream it, you can probably find a group of people to build it. The fact that I have different groups to express all the different parts of myself: creative, technological, artistic, studious, etc.
BRAMWELL: What do you find most challenging?
TIGRILLA: That we are not perfect. We are real human beings each with our own problems. It is easy to think that because we live in a Spiritual EcoCommunity we should all be enlightened, but it is just not the case. Each of us has a different path with different speeds. We are not perfect, we are learning to love and respect one another without judgment just like the rest of the world is. It is great that we have tools, but human nature is at times lazy and habitual. It is exactly what makes Damanhur so amazing and unique that also makes it challenging.
BRAMWELL: What’s the next big project?
TIGRILLA: It depends on who you ask. Damanhur has many big projects: the Tempio Bosco (Forest Temple) and related projects, making our School of Meditation even more accessible, the launch of a new and improved website with more sharing than ever before, the Music of the Plants and Plant Perception research, the Community School for children, Spiritual Physics discoveries, and the list goes on and on.
David Bramwell is the author of The Number Nine Bus to Utopia: How One Man’s Extraordinary Journey Led to a Quiet Revolution (Unbound).
