Not even in my best dreams!

[Amanda Viola]

Who could tell that warm Christmas night of 1958, in Caracas (Venezuela), when I received absolutely happy –yet putting on my mask of arrogance- the "Loving You" album as a present, that Elvis Aaron Presley would change my life forever and so definitively?

A little earlier that year, I "discovered" him in the "King Creole" film. And it was an earthquake, a volcano exploding, a thunder… all together, shaking the very bottom of my heart. For the very first time in my life, I found a kindred soul! He echoed every bit of me that could not find full expression: the Love and the sorrow, what I was, what I felt, what I missed. He became an inner place to go. A profound surge to merge my heart with his, to share a hidden kingdom with him, kept awakening his presence in me, in all my days, thinking of him, writing his name everywhere, and in all my nights, dreaming of him so very often...

Then I wrote in my diary "I'm in love with Elvis because I'm in love with LOVE, and Elvis is LOVE". To come to that conclusion calmed a little such emotional upheaval, but only a little. In fact, I believe I came very close to what I think is the reason of the phenomenon Elvis:

To my understanding, LOVE is the Harbour in our journey back HOME. The potential to be permanently anchored in Its shore is inscribed within us. All pain and unhappiness are born from the fact of thinking of ourselves as apart from that Harbour. Our Inner Being knows the way HOME and its voice tries to guide us to its safety. But we tend to listen to the vociferation of the world and become deft to this inner voice.

Elvis was a clarion. He not only expressed beautifully the quality of LOVE, but also the suffering of the lost and lonesome. Anyone open to him, which listened or reached him somehow, felt something indecipherable that touched deeply the most hidden feelings of our heart. And one could be not renounce to that feeling, because it "talked" directly to our hardened ears about ourselves. And he still does, more than ever.