Spirituality
and Creativity to Proclaim the Beauty of Life
Interview
with Salvatore Domolo
by
Maria Teresa De Donato
Today I have the pleasure
and honor of introducing you to a very special person: Salvatore Domolo.
Salvatore is a very
humble man who, had I met him, would have qualified at best as a Floral
Designer and at most as the author of a few books.
By carefully reading his
biography and doing other research on the net, I discovered that there is much
more to this man: a depth of thought, a very high level of knowledge and
awareness, and an inner richness that, often and paradoxically, are the result
of the sufferings experienced, of the trials passed, and the consequent lessons
learned.
There is still much to say
about him, but I want Salvatore himself to reveal himself by making us
participants in his spiritual life and not, and, above all, in his
extraordinary creativity.
MTDD: Salvatore, welcome
to my Blog and Virtual Cultural Salon, and thank you for agreeing to
participate in this interview.
SD:
Thank you Maria Teresa for inviting me and for the esteem you have towards me.
MTDD: I am in love with
your creations and paintings on glass, but before we begin exploring this
wonderful activity of yours, I would like you to introduce yourself to our
readers by starting to tell us about your childhood.
SD:
I was born in a small town on Lake Orta and I lived my childhood and adolescence
in the family home, in this fairy-tale place full of natural stimuli. The
domestic vegetable garden, the garden, and above all the woods adjacent to the
large nineteenth-century house contributed to my inner formation, arousing a
profound interiority that from my childhood has been transformed into
creativity. At the age of 8, watching a florist setting up floral arrangements
for a wedding, the desire to create floral arrangements exploded in me. From
that moment on, every occasion was good to express my inner garden with flowers
and leaves.
MTDD: I know that when you were very young, at the age of 14 you entered the seminary.
Did you continue to
cultivate your passion there too?
SD: Yes,
I continued to cultivate this passion of mine by setting up floral decorations
for special occasions. Once I became a priest, I even strengthened it by making
it a spiritual tool.
MTDD: How did you live
your years as a priest?
SD:
I was an uncomfortable and revolutionary priest. At 38, I graduated in Communication
Sciences, writing a thesis on the anthropology of floral language. This thesis
allowed me to summarize my three great passions: nature, the evangelical
message of freedom, and floral art as a tool to announce the beauty of life.
MTDD: Are there other
sectors or ways in which you were able to use these great passions of yours and
your studies?
SD:
Certainly. The studies I undertook, the passion for flowers, my free vision,
sought after and suffered in the inner depths, allowed me to carry out conferences,
spiritual encounters, and simple dialogues on the fundamental theme of the
Wood, the Tree, and the Flower as the main archetypes to know yourself and
enter into solidarity with the whole.
MTDD:
Very beautiful, poetic, and equally profound this thought of yours which also
reveals a path of personal growth crowned by the achievement of greater
Awareness.
Would you like to tell us
about it?
SD:
The Awareness of the 2 ethical principles – self-knowledge and solidarity with
everything – allowed me to finally free myself, after 15 years of profound
interior research, from the priestly ministry, abandoning the Catholic Church
to embark on a mystical path, completely free from religious schemes.
This new life allowed me,
albeit with great effort and suffering, to rework great interior themes, thus
allowing me to strengthen and transmit the awareness of natural archetypes
(Wood, Tree, Flower), to enrich her floral creative experience by becoming a
Floral Designer and to help the people I meet to find within themselves the
golden thread of their creativity.
MTDD: What were the
biggest difficulties, the biggest obstacles to overcome during your journey?
SD:
First of all, the perception of being completely alone while facing the great
inner transformation, distancing myself from the great pre-established
religious and social systems. To make the choices I lived, I had to distance
myself, and even when I would be talking to people I felt that they could not
understand the internal journey that is so arduous.
Another great difficulty
was separating religion from spirituality, being a priest from my inner depth;
I even had to get to an atheist experience to be able to remove all the rubble
that lurked in the unconscious, suffocating the soul.
The greatest difficulty
was the liberation from the infinite spiritual proposals that fill our time: I
read everything and I relied on gurus, shamans, practices of all kinds to then
understand that all these formulas are new "drugs" that do not allow us
to simply listen to our own heart. By getting rid of all these
"Harpies" that try to take over our free will and soul it is possible
to achieve the simplicity of life. Here, emptying ourselves of all these idols
was and is the greatest difficulty.
Another great challenge
is accepting that you always have to start everything from scratch. Life is a
continuous transformation in the present and basically what has been, no longer
exists… It is not easy to have that enormous freedom that allows you to abandon
the past. We probably age precisely because we can't get rid of this aspect, we
can't let go of the dead cells.
MTDD: Where did your
inner rebirth take place: at home with your parents in a familiar environment
or elsewhere?
SD:
No. I experienced this new inner synthesis in Tenerife where I wrote my second
book with the provocative and evocative title "in nomine patris". In
this publication of mine, written almost like a river in flood, I recounted my
life by reworking a profound and healthy critique of religions and the
political-social pyramid concept.
Thanks to the profound
experience gained and through a careful analysis, I have described, having
reached full awareness of it, the "macho" scheme that hides behind
this suffocating experience of religions and in particular of the Catholic
religion.
MTDD: While you were
working on your book, did you experiment with other techniques to express your
creativity even more fully, or did you concentrate on writing?
SD:
While I was tackling the drafting of this book of mine, I recovered a creative
experience that I had lived in my youth: painting on glass. However, it was
only in 2017, in a period of deep family suffering, that I reached the full
awareness that I had to surrender to life and immerse myself in the path of
creativity through glass painting.
From that moment on,
everyday life was transformed into a total dedication to painting and I
discovered that this work became a dance with my Soul.
MTDD: Extraordinary
conclusion that you have reached! Would you like to elaborate on this thought
of yours?
SD:
Gladly. Thanks to this inner journey I finally reached the full awareness that
"the birds of the sky do not sow and do not reap because God provides them
with food" (Gospel of Matthew – Chapter 6, Verse 26) This led me to a
drastic decision: that of living in the pleasantness of painting without
worrying about tomorrow ...
My life has thus been
transformed into a garden of delights that allows me to continue to renew
myself internally while enjoying the creative beauty, as well as having
accepted the task of bringing LIGHT simply by creating symbolic lanterns.
MTDD: Hence,
a Floral Designer but also and above all a Bearer of Light. Thank you,
Salvatore, for having participated in this interview and above all for sharing
with us so many interesting points on what your path to personal growth and
development has been and also to a total inner rebirth.
How can readers who wish to
contact you, buy your publications, or even order your beautiful glass
creations enriched by your beautiful paintings, do so?
I can be contacted by
email: Sdomolo@hotmail.com
Or on Facebook and
Instagram as Salvatore Domolo
Or by calling 389 8811968
Heartfelt thanks Maria
Teresa for this beautiful conversation. I believe we all seek one thing: the
Light. I hope these simple words remind us of our goal; we are trees looking
for the Sun and as happens in the woods, we also try to help us find the best
path to let ourselves be warmed and illuminated by the eternal Light, This
Light loves, does not judge, is not interested in the results, but simply wants
to shine through each one of us.
Thanks to you and to
those who will read these words with the hope of finding a ray of their inner
Light.
