When my husband of twenty-six years, our seven year old daughter and I left our very successful and fulfilling life in Los Angeles to move to Damanhur, in Northern Italy in 2009, it was because I felt called to be here. I often describe it as a choice-less choice, and bless my family that they trusted my gut feeling and unshakable conviction enough to allow me to completely transform our lives.
I arrived here with a sense of having been called into this project, but with no idea what exactly that meant. What was it that I was being called here to do?
In the first year and a half of our new lives in Damanhur, my desire was to be of service in any way I could be, as I worked to understand why I was here. I was asked to teach English—in the nursery and kindergarten.
I had arrived here after a successful career as a Broadway lighting designer and more recently, as an award winning writer-producer in Hollywood. Teaching English to a collection of Italian babies, ages 9 months to 5 years, was completely out of my comfort zone.
So, I said yes.
For two years, I turned up a few days a week, wearing a huge floppy hat and an oversized hobo coat that was stitched with great pockets that I filled with colorful scarfs and wooden toys. My hair was pulled into two pony tails, cheeks painted with bright pink circles, and I sang (badly) and made up playful games, in English, for the Damanhurian nursery and kindergarten children. I called up all I could remember from my own daughter’s “Music Together” and Waldorf School nursery days and I cobbled together lesson after lesson, cutting out paper snowflakes in winter and gluing magnets onto cardboard fish and bamboo fishing poles in spring. The principal teacher, Narvolo, who wanted me to have a character name, dubbed me Miss Trudi, during a planning meeting; after spying the Trudi brand tag on one of the plushy toys in the nursery. So for two years, Miss Trudi I was. Somehow, it all worked and I was a rock star in Damanhur, to anyone under the age of five, for that brief period.
It was during this same time, that my husband, Eddie, was doing a language conversation exchange with a woman here by the name of Formica Coriandolo.
She was and is the head of Public Relations in Damanhur and wanted to improve her conversational English. Formica is a “dense” Damanhurian. By dense, I mean someone who has lived here for decades, is totally immersed in this alternative culture, has held a myriad of both leadership and creative roles, is in the upper level of the School of Mediation, the initiatic path in Damanhur and who worked at the right hand of the community’s Spiritual Guide and Founder, Falco, for many years.
She understood from Eddie that I had been a filmmaker. She was in the midst of writing a book and asked him if he thought I might be open to her sharing the story with me.
That was how I found myself sitting in Somachandra, the Damanhurian cafe, across from a woman who would become a huge part of my life. I listened to her tell the story of a book she was writing that was called “The Book of Giulia.” As she told me this story, in halting English, I was struck by something incredible. The story she was telling me, seemed to explore an archetype I had never been exposed to in storytelling before. It was the archetype of a “Group Soul.”
The book that she was writing was not a story she was pulling from her singular imagination. It was the story of a group here in Damanhur, of which she was a part; a group who collectively remember a past or parallel life story that together they shared.
In her book, she takes us on a visceral journey that holds up as the holy grail the love between the man/woman, or couple, and then takes us into a world where this love is superseded by a dimension of love that exists between a group of souls who are united in a Mission for Humanity that connects through lifetimes, beyond the kind of personal bond that exists in even the most evolved and profound of couple love. The journey that she was crafting within her story was unique and so important that in the end of our time together, I remember saying to her: “Formica, I have not worked in the film industry in nine years. Honestly, it is probably easier to raise the money to construct and shoot a rocket ship to the moon, than it is to get a movie made these days, but this story needs to be told and seen by as many people as possible. I want to work with you to turn this into a film and will work to try to get it produced.”
This was the seed.
I worked with Formica over the next months to create a treatment for a film script. I catalyzed a producer friend from the States to come spend time here, to work with us on the budding project. My producer friend and I went to London and I reopened old film industry relationships that had lain dormant for almost a decade.
When I came back to Damanhur, after that trip to London, many other Damanhurians, who had heard that I was working with Formica came to me. Time and again I heard the words: “I have a story.” My group has written a book.” “We have a project we’d like to share with you…”
None of these stories were individual, personal stories. All of these stories were the stories of groups of people who remembered and related past, future or parallel lives together. Their story worlds were diverse and compelling. All of them shared a core ethos and all of them seemed to connect through certain key points in some vast map of uncharted and mythic human history.
It turns out that Damanhur is made up of “tribes” of people, who have made “soul agreements” to meet in this particular place and time. These groups are awake to memories of other lifetimes together.
Damanhur is a very complex multi-dimensional reality with a 43 year history of significant work on this planet. I am now convinced that its founder, Falco, whose work inspired this community (through art, writing, teachings, magical technology and visionary planning), was an enlightened galactic Avatar.
As a former filmmaker and life-long story teller, I felt like had stumbled onto an unparalleled and bulging pandora’s box of story, unlike anything I had ever seen or encountered in my current lifetime. I was also aware that it would take many lifetimes to develop all of these stories into films or books and that somehow, part of what was important was the fact that they were all interconnected, despite the fact that they took place in vastly different realities.
Why I had been called here was becoming clearer, but what was I supposed to do with this pandora’s box of story that was gapping open in front of me? I didn’t know it yet, but Miss Trudi was about to retire…[cont.]
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