Portraits of Extraordinary People:
The courage of Alce

Alce Glicine shares his reflections on the theme of illness and discomfort as an opportunity to reach his own inner Grail.



The Grail, in the meaning of which Falco Tarassaco speaks, is a set of a thousand facets. According to him, it is a force that after having had many different symbols throughout history, such as the chalice, or the spear and shield, today the Grail signals its closeness through discomfort and disease. I struggle to focus on this presence, even after a dozen years that I have lived with an illness in the form of multiple sclerosis, but this has certainly increased the sense of challenge within myself, like a race, perhaps also because I am a sportsman!
I am from Veneto, in the North-East of Italy and I have lived in Damanhur since 2004. Today I am 42 years old. In the past I was a qualified instructor in many sports, as well as being an athlete myself. I’ve always enjoyed being involved in many different sports such as swimming, basketball, games, and physical movement, and I often coached young people.

Just playing basketball with some old friends, one day when I went to visit my parents, I realized that I couldn’t catch the ball. How was this possible I wondered? Taking the ball and putting it in the basket had always been my goal and I had been successfully doing it for a lifetime.
Initially, I attributed my failures to fatigue but soon thereafter, I was involved in a car accident and during my hospitalization, the big picture emerged: my immune system was attacking my nervous structures, damaging in particular my sight and my balance which affected my ability to walk.

You are never alone

As long as I could, I continued my life as I had before, but at a certain point, I had to change my strategy. And here I am in my new life, in which I continue to work in Damanhur on the internal games, called ‘Horusiadi’, and also assisting with the tests of courage that we offer for the children, but in doing so, I had to change many values.
For a sportsman like me, a disease that was going to affect my strength, dynamism and my coordination was initially very hard to accept, although my Damanhurian family helped me to support the changes I was facing. Then, little by little, as if discovering a hidden facet of life, I began to have some acceptance and control over my emotions and explore a new way of life. Would I have met these challenges and grown in this way even without an illness? I don’t know, I only know that I changed and grew a lot by facing many challenges through an illness.

The first important discovery I made was to realize that I was never alone.
When I was in the hospital in Ivrea, after the accident and while my clinical picture became clearer, I remember that the staff and the patients kept asking me “Are you president of some company?”, because I had received so many visits, messages, and phone calls from my friends, Damanhurians and volunteers of the Red Cross (I was busy there too). Thanks to all the attention I was getting, the people thought I was in charge of some association. For me, receiving so much attention was truly a touching experience.

Speak and listen

Then, slowly, over time, I learned a new vision of life and of myself. I still try to always be on the move but I have learned to take time to reflect and study with a pleasure I didn’t know before. I participated in the School of Spiritual Healing through the Damanhur University and now, encouraged by my friends of the New Species association, whom I met during a week-long course at Damannhur Crea, I wish to deepen the study of Gestalt, to continue the work of knowledge of myself.
The value of discomfort is also that of telling one’s own story to others and also listening to them: I didn’t think that sharing the story of one’s own experiences could be so rich. It can help to find themselves in the other parts of themselves that they otherwise don’t know they have.

Falco used to say that the value of illness is to allow personal evolution, if we accept to see it as a Grail that puts us in contact with stronger energies. I feel that it leads me to the deepening of new things, aspects of life, of myself, and of others that I had not considered until now: it is a new way of thought that has entered me, and it is a continuing research.