Season’s greetings and happy 2025

For our seasonal greetings this year, we have chosen a fable written by a young friend, Alice, inspired by a quote from the writer and philosopher Albert Camus.
We share with you this fable and the words from Camus’ novel Return to Tipasa, hoping that this new year will give us the strength to discover and nourish our own “Invincible Summer,” finding new resources within ourselves and spreading kindness and hope around us.
Warm wishes for peace, health, and joy in 2025 from the entire ISICO team.

“Once upon a time there lived the Frozen Winter, the skin coloured in ice-blue, the cheeks puffed by the wind, and hair hidden beneath a thick blanket of snow. He grimly walked road by road, freezing the noses of passersby with a breath, imprisoning the bulbs of forget-me-not flowers in the dark earth, injuring knuckles already stiffened by the frost. And the quicker he walked, silently screaming his cold, the more he felt something strange inside himself that he began to call Symptom.
It felt foreign to him, and he could hear it beating a hymn he did not yet know. “Leave me alone,” he commanded. “Go away,” he pleaded. After sleepless nights, searching for that Symptom, buried deep inside him, he finally fell into a deep sleep.
His dream was… warming? The snow began to melt from his hair, and frosty drops slid down in rivulets, caressing the forehead, his cheekbones, and the chin of an ever more astonished Winter.
Kneeling in front of him was the one he called Symptom. She was a lady with saffron-coloured hair that seemed to have been blindly cut or sliced by a blade, sparkling turquoise eyes, and skin like a mosaic of purple bruises,  a bandage hastily tucked beneath a flowing dress.  
She smiled, her gaze fixed on his. Winter looked away, but her rough hands devoured his gaze. Drawn back to those magnetic eyes, he found himself smiling against his will. In the blurry outlines of the dream, he placed his face closer to hers, bending down until he was on his knees like her; though, she was towering and eventually defeating him.
It was in her whisper that the dream dissolved, leaving only a promise that coursed through every tiny part of Winter’s body. And, as he ran from house to house and the rosy fingers of dawn painted the town, a crystalline laugh echoed brightly, bouncing through the air.
A laugh that was broken only by a single word, now sung, now shouted, now barely whispered: “Summer.”

From Return to Tipasa by Camus:

“Here I recaptured the former beauty, a young sky, and I measured my luck, realizing at last that in the worst years of our madness the memory of that sky had never left me. This was what in the end had kept me from despairing… O light! This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer“