Vixey’s Pawprints

It is all very well for us to try to improve our health, our
standard of living and our relation with nature, but I am beginning to
think we are overdoing it a little.
     In the mail they have sent me three liters of products that
substitute milk; a Norwegian company would like to know if I am
interested in investing in the production of this new type of food,
since, according to specialist David Rietz, “ALL (his capitals) cow
milk contains 59 active hormones, lots of fat, colesterol,dioxins,
bacterias and viruses”.
     I think of the calcium that when I was a child my mother told me
was good for the bones, but the specialist already has an answer for
me: “Calcium? How do cows manage to acquire enough calcium for their
large bone structure? From plants!” Of course, the new product is made
on the basis of plants, and milk is condemned based on an endless
number of studies carried out in a variety of institutes all over the
world.
     How about proteins? David Rietz is implacable: “I know they call
milk ‘liquid meat’ (I have never heard this _expression, but he must
know what he is talking about) on account of the high dose of protein
it contains. But proteins prevent calcium being absorbed by the
organism. Countries that have a protein-rich diet also have a high rate
of osteoporosis (lack of calcium in the bones).”
     In the afternoon my wife sends me a text she found on the Internet:
     “People who are now between 40 and 60 years old used to go about
in cars that did not have safety belts, head rests or airbags. Children
were left loose in the back seat, having a good time jumping around.
Cradles were painted in bright colors that are now considered “dubious”
because they could contain lead or some other dangerous element.”
     I, for example, am part of a generation that built the famous
ball-bearing carts (I do not know how to explain this to today’s
generation – let’s say they were metal balls held between two iron
arcs) and we would roll down the hilly streets of Botafogo using our
shoes as brakes, falling, hurting ourselves, but ever so proud of our
high-speed adventure.
     The text goes on:
     “There were no cellular phones, our parents had no way of knowing
where we were: how could that be possible? Children were never right,
they were always being punished, but even so they did not have
psychological problems of rejection or lack of love. At school there
were good students and bad students: the good ones passed, the bad ones
had to repeat the year. This was not a reason for consulting a
psychotherapist – they just had to repeat the year.”
     And even so we survived with some scratched knees and few traumas.
Not only did we survive, but we also fondly remember the time when milk
was not poison, when children had to solve their problems without any
help, fought when they had to, and spent a great part of the day
without electronic games, inventing their own games with their friends.

     But let us go back to the topic of the column: I decided to try
the new miraculous product that substitutes the killer milk. I did not
get past the first sip. I asked my wife and our maid to try it, without
explaining what it was: they both said they had never tasted anything
as foul in their life.
     I am worried about the children of tomorrow, with their electronic
games, parents with mobile phones, psychotherapists helping at each
defeat and – above all – having to drink this “magic potion” that will
keep them free of cholesterol, osteoporosis, 59 active hormones, and
toxins.
     The will live with lots of health, lots of equilibrium, and when
they grow up they will discover milk (by that time, perhaps it will be
banned by law). Maybe in the year 2050 a scientist will endeavor to
rescue something that has been consumed since time began.
     Or will we have to get our milk from drug dealers?
                  

New book
“The Zahir” is being published all over the world this year. Click here for more information.

Prague, 1981
     Once, in the winter of 1981, I was walking with my wife through
the streets of Prague when we came across a young man drawing the
buildings around him.
     Although I dread carrying things with me when I travel (and there
was still a traveling ahead), I was taken by one of the drawings and
decided to buy it.
     When I handed him the money I noticed that he was not wearing
gloves, despite the cold weather (it was 5 degrees below zero).
     “Why aren’t you wearing gloves?” I asked.
     “So I can hold the pencil.” And he began to tell me how loved
Prague in the winter, that was the best season to draw the city. He was
so happy with his sale that he decided to do a portrait of my wife
without charging anything.
     While I was waiting for him to finish the drawing, I realized that
something odd had happened: we had chatted for almost five minutes
without being able to speak one another’s language. We made ourselves
understood only by gestures, laughter, facial expressions and the
desire to share something.
     The simple desire to share something had enabled us to enter into
the world of language without words, where everything is always clear
and there is not the slightest risk of being misunderstood.

Someone arrives from Morocco
     Someone arrives from Morocco and tells me a strange story about how certain tribes see original sin.
     Eve was walking through the Garden of Eden when the serpent crawled up to her.
     “Eat this apple,” said the serpent.
     Eve (very well instructed by God) refused.
     “Eat this apple,” insis­ted the serpent, “because you have to be more beautiful for your man.”
     “I don’t have to,” answered Eve. “Because he’s got no other woman besides me.”
     The serpent laughed:
     “Of course he has.”
     And since Eve did not believe him, he took her to the top of a hill where there was a well.
     “She’s inside this cave. Adam hid her down there.”
     Eve leaned over and saw a beautiful woman reflected in the water
of the well. Right there and then she ate the apple that the serpent
offered her.
     According to this same Moroccan tribe, those who recognize
themselves in the reflection of the well and are no longer afraid of
themselves return to Paradise.

                  

I am in New York
     I am in New York, wake up late for a meeting, and when I go
downstairs I find out that the police have towed away my car. I arrive
late, lunch goes on longer than it should, I rush to the Traffic
Department to pay a fine that is going to cost me a fortune.
     I remember the one-dollar bill that I found on the ground
yesterday and contrive an apparently crazy relationship between that
dollar bill and everything that happened in the morning:
     Maybe I picked up the money before the right person could find it.
     Maybe I removed that dollar from the path of someone who needed it.
     Maybe I interfered with what is written.
     I need to get rid of it. I see a beggar sitting on the sidewalk
and give him the money – I seem to have managed to put things back in
balance.
     “Just a moment,” says the beggar.” “I’m not asking for money, I’m a poet.”
     And he hands me a list of titles for me to pick a poem.
      “The shortest one, because I’m in a hurry.”
     The beggar turns towards me and says:
     “It’s not one of mine, but it’s very beautiful. It goes like this:
“There is one way for you to know whether you have fulfilled your
mission on Earth: if you’re still alive it’s because you haven’t
fulfilled it yet.”

                  

Getting through just one night
     At the age of twelve, Milton Ericksson was a victim of polio. Ten
months after he contracted the disease, he heard a doctor tell his
parents: “your son won’t live through the night.”
     Ericksson heard his mother crying. “Maybe she won’t suffer so much
if I get through tonight,” he thought to himself. And he decided not to
sleep till dawn.
     In the morning he shouted out: “Hey mother! I’m still alive!”
     There was so much joy in the house that from then on he resolved
to resist always one more night in order to postpone his parents’
suffering.
     He died in 1990 at the age of 75, leaving behind a series of
important books on the enormous capacity that man has to overcome his
own limitations.

Restoring the canvas
     In New York I am going to have late-afternoon tea with a rather
unusual artist. She works in a bank on Wall Street, but one day she had
a dream: she had to go to twelve places in the world and in each place
make a painting or a sculpture using material from nature.
     So far she has managed to complete four of these works. She shows
me photos of one of them: an Indian sculpted inside a cave in
California. While she awaits the signs from her dreams, she goes on
working at the bank – in that way she saves up the money to travel and
fulfill her task.
     I ask her why she does this.
     “It’s to keep the world in equilibrium,” she answers. “It may seem
silly, but there is something tenuous that joins us all and we can make
it better or worse according to how we act. We can save or destroy so
much with a simple gesture that at times seems utterly useless. It may
even be that my dreams are a lot of nonsense, but I don’t want to run
the risk of not following them. For me, people are related just like a
huge, fragile spider’s web. I am trying through my work to mend a part
of that web.”

The hundredth name (Sufi tradition)
     A student asked his Sufi master to reveal God’s fifth name.
     “Whoever knows that name is capable of changing History,” he
answered. The master asked him to spend the whole day at the gates of
the city.
     The boy returned the following day.
     “What did you see?” asked the master.
     “An old man tried to enter the city to sell a sheep. The guard
wanted to tax him but the man had no money. So the guard stole his
sheep and chased him off. I thought: if I only knew God’s hidden name I
could change this situation.”
     “You could have prevented this injustice, but you preferred to
stand there dreaming of a revelation. Such stupidity! Well, then, I
shall tell you God’s fifth name: act on behalf of others. That’s the
only way we can change History.”

I don’t mean to offend you (Islamic tradition)
     During his pilgrimage to Mecca, a holy man began to feel the
presence of God. In the midst of a trance he knelt down, hid his face
and prayed: “Lord, I ask for only one thing in life: that I be given
the grace of never offending you.”
     “I cannot grant you that grace,” answered the Almighty. ‘If you
don’t offend me I shall have no reason to pardon you. If I have no need
to pardon you, soon you will also forget the importance of mercy
towards others. So go on your way with Love and let me grant pardon now
and again so that you don’t forget that virtue as well.”

Pupils and teachers (Sufi tradition)
     Nasrudin - the eternal character of Sufi legends – was standing on
his doorstep when he saw a teacher passing by with his pupils.
     “Where are you off to?” he asked.
     “We’re going to pray that God puts a stop to corruption, for He
always heeds the prayers of children,” answered the teacher.
     “A good education would have put an end to that already. Teach the
youngsters to be more responsible than their parents and uncles.”
     The teacher felt offended: “What an example of lack of faith! The prayers of children can change anything!”
     “God listens to all who pray. If he only listened to the prayers
of children there wouldn’t be a single school in the whole country, for
there is nothing they hate more than their teachers.”

I met a fiddler (Hassidic tradition)
     A disciple approached Rabbi Moshé Haim: “Today I met a man who laughed and scorned my striving for spiritual grace.”
     “Today I met a fiddler,” answered the Rabbi. “He played with such
divine inspiration that all who drew near began to sing and dance. I
followed suit and was praising Creation with my joy when I saw a deaf
man approach us. He stood there watching the fiddler and everyone
dancing away. Finally he said in a loud voice: “What an indecent and
grotesque display by a bunch of madmen!”
     And Moshé Haim concluded: “Those who don’t know how to listen to God’s music can only conclude that it is useless.”

The Caliph and his wife
     The Arab Caliph sent for his secretary:
     “Lock up my wife in the tower while I’m away,” he ordered.
     “But she loves Your Majesty!”
     “And I love her,” answered the Caliph. “But I respect an old
traditional prover­b of ours that says "keep your dog thin and he will
follow you; make him fat and he will bite you."
     The Caliph went off to war and returned six months later. On
arriving, he called for his secretary and asked to see his wife.
     “She has abandoned you,” was the secretary’s answer. “Your Majesty
quoted a beautiful proverb before leaving but forgot another Arab
saying that goes: "If your dog is tied up it will follow anybody that
opens its cage".

Trying to control the soul
     We often think we can control love. And then we catch ourselves
asking the completely useless question: "is it really worth it?"
     Love does not bother itself with that question. Love refuses to be
priced like some piece of merchandise. One of the characters in Bertold
Brecht’s play "The Good Person of Szechuan" tells us about true love:
     "I want to be next to the one I love.
     I don’t care what this will cost me.
     I don’t care whether this will do my life good or bad.
     I don’t care whether this person loves me or not.
     All I want, all I need is to be close to the one I love."

The measure of love
     “I have always wanted to know if I was able to love like you do,” said the disciple of a Hindu master.
     “There is nothing beyond love,” answered the master. “It’s love
that keeps the world going round and the stars hanging in the sky.”
     “I know all that. But how can I know if my love is great enough?”
     “Try to find out if you abandon yourself to love or if you flee
from your emotions. But don’t ask questions like that because love is
neither great nor small. You can’t measure a feeling like you measure a
road: if you act like that you will see only your reflection, like the
moon in a lake, but you won’t be following your path.”

The contemplative quest
     Linda Sabbath took her three sons and decided to go and live on a
small farm in the interior of Canada, where she wanted to dedicate
herself completely to spiritual contemplation.
     In less than a year she fell in love, got married again, studied
the saints’ techniques of meditation, fought for a school for her
children, made friends, make enemies, neglected her teeth, got herself
an abscess, hitchhiked in snowstorms, learned to fix the car, thaw out
frozen pipes, make her alimony stretch out at month’s end, survive on
unemployment money, sleep without indoor heating, laugh for no reason,
cry with despair, build a chapel, make repairs to the house, paint
walls, and give courses on spiritual contemplation.
     “And I eventually realized that a life of prayer does not mean isolation,” she says. “Love is so big it has to be shared.

This is really shocking….

October 1 today and my last entry here was in June!

I can’t believe that for over three months, I have not spent any alone time with my thoughts.

This is crazy and it has to stop. Seriously need better time management to include some sane minutes devoted just for me.

hmmm…well…think I will do that tomorrow. Yup…tomorrow.
What? Not soon enough? Well, I waited three months…another day won’t make a difference!

     On the same morning, three signs arrive from
different continents: an e-mail from journalist Lauro Jardim asking for
confirmation of some data on a note about me and mentioning the situation in
the Rocinha slum neighborhood in

Rio
  de Janeiro

. A phone call from my wife who has just
landed in

France

:
she has been traveling with a couple of French friends to show them our country
and they ended their trip frightened and disappointed. And lastly, the
journalist who is coming to interview me for a Russian television channel: “Is
it true that in your country half a million people were murdered between 1980
and 2000?”
     “Of course it isn’t true, “ I answer.
     But it is. He shows me data from “a Brazilian
institute” (actually the Brazilian

Institute

of

Geography

and
Statistics, one of the most prestigious in the country).
     I keep silent. The violence in my country crosses
oceans and mountains and comes all the way to this place in Central Asia
Central. What to say?
     Saying is not enough; words that are not turned
into action “bring the pest”, as William Blake said. I have tried to do my
part: I opened my institute, and together with two heroic persons, Isabella and
Yolanda Maltarolli, we try to give education, affection, and love to 360
children from the Pavão-Pavãozinho slum in

Rio de Janeiro

. I know that at this moment
there are thousands of Brazilians doing much more, working away in silence,
without any official help, without any private support, just not to let
themselves be overwhelmed by the worst enemy of all: despair.
     At some moment I thought that if everyone did
their part things would change. But tonight, as I contemplate the frozen
mountains at the border with

China

,
I have some doubts. Perhaps, even with each one of us doing our part, the
saying I learned as a youngster still holds true: “there is no argument against
force.”
     I look at the mountains again, lit up by the
moon. I wonder if there is no argument against force. Like all Brazilians, I
have tried, fought, and forced myself to believe that the situation in my
country will one day get better, but each year that passes things seem to grow
more complicated, regardless of who is in the government, the party, the
economic plans, or the absence of any plans.
     I have seen violence in the four corners of the
world. I remember once in the

Lebanon

,
right after the war of devastation, I was walking through the ruins of

Beirut

with a friend
called Söula Saad. She remarked to me that her city had been destroyed seven
times. I asked her half in jest why they did not give up re-building and just
move elsewhere. “Because this is our city,” she answered. “Because those who do
not honor the earth where their ancestors are buried will be damned for ever.”
     The human being who does not honor his land does
not honor himself. In one of the Greek myths of creation, one of the gods,
furious at the fact that Prometheus has robbed the fire and is going to make
men independent, sends Pandora to marry his brother, Epimetheus. Pandora brings
a box with her, which she is forbidden to open. However, just like Eve in the
Christian myth, her curiosity gets the better of her: she lifts the lid to see
what is inside and at that moment all the evil in the world is released and
spreads over the Earth.
     Only one thing remained inside: Hope.
     So, despite everything pointing to the opposite,
despite all my sadness, this feeling of impotence, despite being this very
moment almost convinced that nothing is going to get better, I cannot lose the
only thing that keeps me alive: hope – that word always used with such irony by
pseudo-intellectuals who consider it a synonym for “fooling someone.” That word
so manipulated by governments who make promises fully aware that they are not
going to keep them and tear the hearts of the people even more. That word is
with us so often in the morning, is wounded in the course of the day and dies
at nightfall, yet always rises with the dawn.
     Yes, there is a saying that goes: “there is no
argument against force.” But there is another saying that goes: “where there is
life there is hope.” And that is the one I shall remember, while I gaze at the
snow-covered mountains on the Chinese border.

Copyright @ 2005 by  Paulo  Coelho
Warrior Of The Light

Today was such a yummy day! I completed The Star’s Word Puzzle and dropped it off at the Kelana Jaya post office. I can already picture my face in the papers as the first prize winner of RM30,000. WOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Well it wasn’t really all fun and games trying to stick those itty bitty bits of paper together, watching the ink smudge because of the glue and getting carbon all over the place. YUCK! But thats a small price to pay for the RM30,000 I guess. But still, I wish we had the ready made post card thingy they gave out last year.

Ahh well….

Anyway, the icing on the cake for today was visiting the Brickfield’s Buddhist Temple. Although I was baptized as a Catholic, Buddhism has always been the anchor of my spirituality. And lucky for me, my parents had the wisdom to expand my horizons by not supressing my quest for God and MY Path. It feels rather nice having the little yellow string tied to my wrist. The string in itself has no power but its a reminder that there is something infinitely powerful and beautiful in the human spirit.

That with a little hope and faith, all things are possible. Namaste!