Preface to Antonia Tosini's Book on Human Rights and Peace, "Bread and Sunflower"
Antonia Tosini's masterful tribute to human rights and peace, "Bread and Sunflower" is a collection of ideals worthy of every reader's time and meditation. Ambassador Tosini's commitment to peace and human rights is commendable. Her visionary work in this book, and her humanitarian efforts around the world are a gift to us all.
Fear is the greatest enemy; the father of all suffering, and love is the only cure for humanity's great afflictions. Throughout the pages of her soulful dedication to human rights and peace, "Bread and Sunflower," the reader is confronted with the grizzly realities of human life on Earth; a reality from which most people try to remain unattached. Far from unattached, Tosini has taken the savage plight of humanity's most grotesque and tortured victims deep into her heart. While her writings and thoughts meditate on these monstrous realities, they are passionately enjoined with her unique and unyielding positive resolve. From an indefatigable vision of hope that dwells deep in the author's soul, comes the miracle of a graceful new awareness; an awareness that while these horrors exist, we are all one, and there is still hope.
Antonia's "Bread and Sunflower," is replete with ghastly visions, such as an unwanted "newborn baby being thrown into a river," by its father in her poem, "Out of the River." The emotional and poignant metaphor of that child being swallowed by the river as a "tiny flower," is enough to send the reader desperately searching for the solid ground of meaning and sanity in an insane world, for both violence and murder are forms of insanity. A mind selfishly uninvolved with the world's suffering will be rightfully molested by the author's poem, "Perversion," which chillingly whispers of a predator who, "Tastes the purity of the child," and in the aftermath of reading her lines about, "the little soul which sinks into nothingness," the reader too sinks into nothingness with that child. The awareness brought to each reader concerning these beastly acts is inescapable, for as the author skillfully illustrates in her work, we are all made victims; first by the act, and second by those who do nothing, or do not care.
In "I Want," the author proclaims, "I want a world of love with no violence." Yet in, "LA TUA MANO," we are reminded of a "disgraceful world with no wisdom." What do we do when the world seemingly lacks the wisdom to live in the grace of peace, rather than a state of dis-ease? How can we, "break the chains of poverty and prejudice," which shackle each soul through the universal links of fear, greed and indifference? Like all of the great peacemakers throughout history, Antonia Tosini knows that the only answer is LOVE.
In this book, "Bread and Sunflower," there exists two worlds. One world is nothing short of hell on Earth. It is a place where the unlimited creativity of humanity has been bridled and abducted by fear to create a vision of cruelty and indifference so chilling, that death itself has become a welcomed and kind benefactor. The other world is a world held in your hands. You, and those who love peace are the keepers of the bless'ed torch of hope, and its tendril flames, that burn in the hearts of every soul throughout the world, no matter how oppressed and downtrodden. Those who embrace love are the strength, for they who yearn in their deepest sinews that their children would live in a world of limitless possibilities, where each soul could reach the heights of their potential to love, and to be loved.
As you will discover through the pages of "Bread and Sunflower," the only difference between these two worlds, that will ever exist-- IS YOU.
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