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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