Witch of Portobello 2

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My way of approaching Allah has been through calligraphy, and the search for the perfect meaning of each word. A single letter requires us to distill in it all the energy it contains, as if we were carving out its meaning. When sacred texts are written, they contain the soul of the man who served as an instrument to spread them throughout the world. And that doesn’t apply only to sacred texts, but to every mark we place on paper. Because the hand that draws each line reflects the soul of the person making that line.

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What is a teacher? It isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best to discover what she already knows.

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I can combine two things: movement and stillness, joy and concentration.

It is done with great technique but with soul as well. For that to happen, the intention of the write must in be in harmony with the word. In this case, the saddest verses cease to be clothes in tragedy and are transformed into simple facts encountered along the way.

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You have learnt what you need to learn. Your calligraphy is getting more and more individual and spontaneous. It’s no longer a mere repetition of beauty, but a personal, creative gesture. You have understood what all great painters understand: in order to forget the rules, you must know them and respect them.

You no longer need the tools that helped you learn. You no longer need paper, ink or brush, because the path is more important that whatever made you set off along it.

If words are joined together, they wouldn’t make sense, or, at the very least, they’d be extremely hard to decipher. The spaces are crucial. You have to understand the blank spaces.

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Ten minutes after the music had started, she stood up. What I saw next – or, rather, what everyone in the restaurant saw – was a goddess revealing herself in all her glory, a priestess invoking angels and demons.

Her eyes were closed and she seemed no longer to be conscious of who she was or where she was or why she was there; it was as if she were floating and simultaneously summoning up her past, revealing her presenting and predicting her future. She mingled her eroticism with chastity, pornography with revelation, worship of God and nature, all at the same time.

People stopped eating and started watching what was happening. She was no longer following the music, the musicians were trying to keep up with her steps, and that restaurant in the basement of an old building in the city of Sibiu was transformed into an Egyptian temple, where the worshippers of Isis used to gather for their fertility rites. The smell of roast meat and wine was transmuted into an incense that drew us all into the same trance-like state into the same experience of leaving the world and entering an unknown dimension.

The string and wind instruments had given up, only the percussion played on. Athena was dancing as if she were no longer there, with sweat running down her face, her bare feet beating on the wooden floor. A woman got up and very gently tied a scarf around her neck and breasts, because her blouse kept threatening to slip off her shoulders. Athena, however, appeared not to notice; she was inhabiting other spheres, experiencing the frontiers of worlds that almost touch ours, but never reveal themselves.

The other people in the restaurant started clapping in time to the music, and Athena was dancing every faster, feeding on that energy, and spinning round and round, balancing in the void, snatching up everything that we, poor mortals, wanted to offer to the supreme divinity.

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We don’t posses the Earth, the Earth possesses us. We used to travel constantly, and everything around us was ours: the plants, the water, the landscapes through which our caravans passed. Our laws were nature’s laws: the strong survived, and we, the weak, the eternal exiles, learned to hide our strength and to use it only when necessary. We don’t believe that God made the universe. We believe tht God is the universe and that we are contained in Him, and He in us. Although in my opinion we should call “Him” “Goddess” or “mother” - like the woman in all of us, who protects us when we are in danger. She will always be with us while we perform our daily tasks with love and job, understanding that nothing is suffering, that everything is a way of praising Creation.

Our ritual – we sit around a fire that has just been lit; we play instruments, we sing, we dance, we tell stories.

Worshipping someone means placing that person outside our world. We are not worshipping anyone or anything; we are simply communing with creation.

The only thing that unites gypsies in religious terms is the worship of St. Sarah and making a pilgrimage, at least once in our lifetime to visit her tomb in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Some tribes call her Kali Sarah, Black Sarah. Or the Virgin of the Gypsies, as she’s known in Lourdes.

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The Witch of Portobello

Paulo Coelho as always was so profound - not in a truthful kind of way, but more in a mystic kind of way. I believe he propagates 'developing into more of oneself'. Becoming more of yourself. After this book, I see nature differently...and a small thing like calligraphy - how beautifully it has been described.

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We women, when we‘re searching for a meaning to our lives or for the path of knowledge, always identify with one or four classic archetypes.

The Virgin (and I’m not speaking here of a sexual virgin) is the one whose search springs from her complete independence, and everything she learns is the fruit of her ability to face challenges alone.

The Martyr finds her way to self-knowledge through pain, surrender and suffering.

The Saint finds her true reason for living in unconditional love and in her ability to give without asking anything in return.

Finally, the Witch justifies her existence by going in search of complete and limitless pleasure.

Normally, a woman has to choose from one of these traditional feminine archetypes, but Athena was all four at once.

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What did Athena do? She did a little of everything, but, if I had to summarize her life, I’d say: she was a priestess who understood the forces of nature. Or, rather, she was someone who, by the simple facts of having little to lose or to hope for in life, took greater risks than other people and ended up being transformed into the forces she thought she has mastered.

She was a supermarket checkout girl, a bank employee, a property dealer, and in each of these positions she always revealed the priestess within. I lived with her for eight years, and I owed her this: to recover her memory, her identity.

The most difficult in collecting together these statements was persuading people to let me use their real names. Some said they didn’t was to be involved in this kind of story; other tried to conceal their opinions and feelings. I explained that my real intention was to help all those involved to understand her better, and that no reader would believe in anonymous statements.

They finally agreed because they all believed that they knew the unique and definitive version of any event, however significant. During the recordings, I saw that things are never absolute; they depend on each individual’s perceptions. And the best way to know who we are is often to find out how others see us.

This doesn’t mean that we should do what other expect us to do, but it helps us to understand ourselves better. I owed it to Athena to recover her story, to write her myth.

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But the fact is that, to a greater or lesser extent, all creative human beings have such experiences, which are known as ‘possession by the sacred’. Suddenly, for a fraction of a second, we feel as if our whole life is justified, our sins forgiven, and that love is still the strongest force, one that can transform us forever.

But, at the same time, we feel afraid. Surrendering completely to love, be it human or divine, means giving up everything, including our own well-being or our ability to make decisions. It means loving in the deepest sense of the word.

..Love arrives, moves in and starts directing everything. Only very strong souls allow themselves to be swept along, and Athena was a strong soul.

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As I later learned, music is as old as human beings. Music isn’t just something that comforts or distracts us, it goes beyond that – it’s an ideology. You can judge people by the kind of music they listen to.

As I watched Athena dance during her pregnancy and listened to her play the guitar to calm the baby and make him feel loved, I began to allow her way of seeing the world to affect my life too.

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A saint is someone who lives his or her life with dignity. All we have to do is understand that we’re all here for a reason and to commit ourselves to that. Then we can laugh at our sufferings, large and small, and walk fearlessly, aware that each step has meaning. We can let ourselves be guided by the light emanating from the Vertex.

Vertex is the top most angle of a triangle. In life too, it’s the culminating point, the goal of all those who, like everyone else, make mistakes, but who, even in their darkest moments, never loose sight of the light emanating from their hearts. The vertex is hidden inside us, and we can reach it if we accept it and recognize the light.

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There was a sect who believed that they found the remedy for all ills through a particular form of dance, because the dance brought the dancer into contact with the light from the Vertex.

“Dance to the point of exhaustion, as if you were a mountaineer climbing a hill, a sacred mountain. Dance until you are so out of breath that your organism is forced to obtain oxygen some other way, and it is that, in the end, which will cause you to lose your identity and your relationship with space and time. Dance only to the sound of percussion; repeat the process everyday; know that, at a certain moment, your eyes will, quite naturally, close, and you will begin to see a light that comes from within, a light that answers your questions and develops yours hidden powers"

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Although I get tired when I’m dancing, when I stop, I seem to be in a state of grace, of profound ecstasy. I want that ecstasy to last throughout the day and for it to help me find what I lack; the love of a man. I ca see the heart of that man while I’m dancing, but not his face. I sense that he’s close by, which is why I need to remain alert. I need to dance in the morning so that I can spend the rest of the day paying attention to everything that’s going on around me.

Ecstasy means ‘to stand outside yourself’. Spending the whole day outside yourself is asking too much of body and soul.

Do you know what I learnt? That although ecstasy is the ability to stand outside yourself, dance is a way of rising up into space, of discovering new dimensions while still remaining in touch with your body. When you dance, the spiritual world and the real world manage to coexist quite happily. I think classical dancers dance on pointes because they’re simultaneously touching the earth and reaching up to the skies.

During any dance to which we surrender with joy, the brain loses its controlling power, and the heart takes up the reins of the body. Only at that moment does the Vertex appear. As long as we believe in it of course.

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