They can cut down all the flowers, but they will never stop spring (Pablo Neruda)

There is a force in things, and in nature, capable of bending even the worst human will. You just have to keep it alive.

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With a dry and poetic sentence Pablo Neruda It manages to condense the contradictions of life. Black and white, light and dark, good and evil. Human action can be destructive, against ourselves, against others, and against nature: each of us is capable of doing harm. Of cutting flowers. And it matters little if this wasn't the initial intention of an act. But in the end, sooner or later, there is a force of things, a collective will that transcends individual instincts, which has a completely different outcome. And then the spring It comes anyway, and no one can stop it.

The metaphor can be interpreted in various ways, both privately and publicly. Our emotional bonds, our relationships, are a constant journey through a path that alternates between long tunnels and open-air roads. Sometimes there's darkness, sometimes there's full light. Yet if we're well-disposed toward each other, if we haven't lost the capacity to love, spring arrives. With all its eros, capable of crushing thanatos, the sense of death that we also have inside.

Violence is not a condemnation or a necessary fate, whether it appears under the guise of the criminal perversion of femicide or extends to peoples and nations in the atrocities of war. It is always motivated by self-interest, by will, by a way of expressing one's power by cutting the flowers of life. But sooner or later, even after these tunnels, a springtime light arrives, perhaps lit by those who have managed to bear witness with their lives to what the choice of nonviolence truly means, in any gesture, from the smallest to the largest.
The same goes for public life. Those who truly believe in the common good, in the possibility of progress and well-being that aren't concentrated in the hands of a few but are available to all, take into account a series of defeats in their public activity. Someone will succeed in cutting off the flowers they tried to sow. Until spring arrives with its scents and its healthy plants: proof of how willpower, passion, and boldness can alter the unnatural course of things.

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