Like the Flowing River

  'I organize events like this because I need to keep believing that human beings are still in search of a better world. I need to contribute to making this possible.'

  What was his work?

  'I sell churches.'

  And, to my amazement, he went on: 'I'm employed by the Vatican to select buyers, because there are more churches than there are church-goers in Holland. And since we've had some terrible experiences in the past, with sacred places being turned into nightclubs, condominiums, boutiques, and even sex-shops, the system of selling churches has changed. The project has to be approved by the community, and the buyer has to say what he or she is going to do with the building. We normally only accept proposals that include a cultural centre, a charitable institution, or a museum. And what has this to do with the lecture, and with the other events I'm trying to organize? People don't really meet together any more, and if they don't meet, they won't grow.'

  Looking at me hard, he concluded: 'Meetings. That was the mistake I made with you. Instead of just sending e-mails, I should have shown you that I'm made of flesh and blood. Once, when I failed to get a reply from a particular politician, I went and knocked on his door, and he said to me: "If you want something, you need to look the other person in the eye." Ever since then, that's what I've done, and I've had nothing but good results. You can have at your disposal all the means of communication in the world, but nothing, absolutely nothing, can replace looking someone in the eye.'

  Needless to say, I accepted his proposal.

  P.S. When I went to The Hague to give the lecture, and knowing that my wife, who is an artist, has always wanted to set up a cultural centre, I asked to see some of the churches that were for sale. I asked the price of one which used to hold 500 parishioners every Sunday, and it cost one euro (ONE euro!), but the maintenance costs can reach prohibitive levels.

  Genghis Khan and His Falcon

  On a recent visit to Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, I had the chance to accompany some hunters who still use the falcon as a weapon. I don't want to get into a discussion here about the word 'hunt', except to say that, in this case, Nature was simply following its course.

  I had no interpreter with me, but what could have been a problem turned out to be a blessing. Unable to talk to them, I paid more attention to what they were doing. Our small party stopped, and the man with the falcon on his arm remained a little way apart from us and removed the small silver hood from the bird's head. I don't know why he decided to stop just there, and I had no way of asking.

  The bird took off, circled a few times, and then dived straight down towards the ravine and stayed there. When we got close, we found a vixen caught in the bird's talons. That scene was repeated once more during the morning.

  Back at the village, I met the people who were waiting for me and asked them how they managed to train the falcon to do everything I had seen it do, even to sit meekly on its owner's arm (and on mine too; they put some leather armbands on me and I could see the bird's sharp talons close up).

  It was a pointless question. No one had an explanation. They said that the art is passed from generation to generation - father trains son, and so on. But what will remain engraved for ever in my mind are the snowy mountains in the background, the silhouetted figures of horse and horseman, the falcon leaving the horseman's arm, and that deadly dive.

  What also remains is a story that one of those people told me while we were having lunch.

  One morning, the Mongol warrior, Genghis Khan, and his court went out hunting. His companions carried bows and arrows, but Genghis Khan carried on his arm his favourite falcon, which was better and surer than any arrow, because it could fly up into the skies and see everything that a human being could not.

  However, despite the group's enthusiastic efforts, they found nothing. Disappointed, Genghis Khan returned to the encampment and in order not to take out his frustration on his companions, he left the rest of the party and rode on alone. They had stayed in the forest for longer than expected, and Khan was desperately tired and thirsty. In the summer heat, all the streams had dried up, and he could find nothing to drink. Then, to his amazement, he saw a thread of water flowing from a rock just in front of him.

  He removed the falcon from his arm, and took out the silver cup which he always carried with him. It was very slow to fill and, just as he was about to raise it to his lips, the falcon flew up, plucked the cup from his hands, and dashed it to the ground.

  Genghis Khan was furious, but then the falcon was his favourite, and perhaps it, too, was thirsty. He picked up the cup, cleaned off the dirt, and filled it again. When the cup was only half-empty this time, the falcon again attacked it, spilling the water.

  Genghis Khan adored this bird, but he knew that he could not, under any circumstances, allow such disrespect; someone might be watching this scene from afar and, later on, would tell his warriors that the great conqueror was incapable of taming a mere bird.

  This time, he drew his sword, picked up the cup and refilled it, keeping one eye on the stream and the other on the falcon. As soon as he had enough water in the cup and was ready to drink, the falcon again took flight and flew towards him. Khan, with one thrust, pierced the bird's breast.

  The thread of water, however, had dried up; but Khan, determined now to find something to drink, climbed the rock in search of the spring. To his surprise, there really was a pool of water and, in the middle of it, dead, lay one of the most poisonous snakes in the region. If he had drunk the water, he, too, would have died.

  Khan returned to camp with the dead falcon in his arms. He ordered a gold figurine of the bird to be made and on one of the wings, he had engraved:

  Even when a friend does something you do not like,

  he continues to be your friend.

  And on the other wing, he had these words engraved:

  Any action committed in anger is an action

  doomed to failure.

  Looking at Other People's Gardens

  'You can give a fool a thousand intellects, but the only one he will want is yours,' says an Arabic proverb. When we start planting the garden of our life, we glance to one side and notice our neighbour is there, spying. He himself is incapable of growing anything, but he likes to give advice on when to sow actions, when to fertilize thoughts, and when to water achievements.

  If we listen to what this neighbour is saying, we will end up working for him, and the garden of our life will be our neighbour's idea. We will end up forgetting about the earth we cultivated with so much sweat and fertilized with so many blessings. We will forget that each centimetre of earth has its mysteries that only the patient hand of the gardener can decipher. We will no longer pay attention to the sun, the rain, and the seasons; we will concentrate instead only on that head peering at us over the hedge.

  The fool who loves giving advice on our garden never tends his own plants at all.

  Pandora's Box

  During the course of one morning, I receive three signs coming from different continents. An e-mail from the journalist, Lauro Jardim, asking me to confirm certain facts in a note about me, and mentioning the situation in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro. A phone call from my wife, who has just landed in France. She had taken a couple who are friends of ours to Brazil to show them the country, and the couple had ended up feeling both frightened and disappointed. Then the journalist who has come to interview me for a Russian television station asks me if it's true that in Brazil over half a million people were murdered between 1980 and 2000.

  Of course it's not true, I say.

  But then he shows me the statistics from 'a Brazilian institute' (the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics as it turns out).

  I fall silent. The violence in my country has crossed oceans and mountains and reached this place in Central Asia. What can I say?

  Saying isn't enough, because words that are not transformed into actions 'breed pestilence', as William Blake said. I have tried to do my bit. I set up my institute,
along with two heroic people, Isabella and Yolanda Maltarolli, where we try to give education, affection and love to 360 children from the Pavao-Pavaozinho favela or shanty town. I know that, at this moment, thousands of Brazilians are doing much more: working away silently, without official help, without private support, merely in order not to be overwhelmed by that worst of all enemies - despair.

  I used to think that if everyone played their part, then things would change; but tonight, while I look out at the icy mountains on the frontier with China, I have my doubts. Perhaps, even with everyone doing their bit, the saying I learned as a child is still true: 'You cannot argue with force.'

  I look again at the mountains lit by the moon. Is it really true that against force there is no argument? Like all Brazilians, I tried and fought and struggled to believe that the situation in my country would, one day, get better; but with each year that passes, things only seem to grow more complicated, regardless of who the president is, which political party is in power, what their economic plans are, or, indeed, regardless of the absence of all these things.

  I've witnessed violence in the four corners of the world. I remember once, in Lebanon, immediately after the devastating war there, I was walking amongst the ruins of Beirut with a friend, Soula Saad. She told me that her city had now been destroyed seven times. I asked, jokingly, why they didn't give up rebuilding it and move somewhere else. 'Because it's our city,' she replied. 'Because the person who does not honour the earth in which his ancestors are buried will be cursed for all eternity.'

  The person who dishonours his country, dishonours himself. In one of the classic Greek creation myths, Zeus, furious because Prometheus had stolen fire and thus given independence to mortal men, sends Pandora off to marry Prometheus' brother, Ephemetheus. Pandora takes with her a box which she has been forbidden to open. However, just as with Eve in Christian mythology, her curiosity gets the better of her. She lifts the lid to see what is inside and, at that moment, all the evils of the world fly out and scatter about the earth. Only one thing remains inside: hope.

  So, despite the fact that everything contradicts this, despite my sadness and my feelings of impotence, despite being almost convinced at this moment that nothing will ever get better, I cannot lose the one thing that keeps me alive: hope - that word treated with such irony by pseudointellectuals, who consider it a synonym of 'deceit'. That word, so manipulated by governments, who make promises they know they will not keep, and thus inflict even more wounds on people's hearts. That word that so often rises with us in the morning, gets sorely wounded as the day progresses, dies at nightfall, and is reborn with the new day.

  Yes, there is a saying that states that 'You cannot argue with force'; but there is another saying: 'Where there's life, there's hope.' And I hang on to that saying as I look across at the snowy mountains on the Chinese border.

  How One Thing Can Contain Everything

  A meeting in the house of a Sao Paulo-born painter based in New York. We are talking about angels, and about alchemy. At one point, I try to explain to the other guests the alchemical idea that each of us contains the whole universe and that we are, therefore, responsible for its wellbeing. I struggle to find the right words, but cannot come up with a good image that will explain my point of view.

  The painter, who has been listening in silence, asks everyone to look out of the window of his studio.

  'What can you see?' he asks.

  'A street in Greenwich Village,' someone replies.

  The painter sticks a piece of paper over the window so that the street can no longer be seen; then, with a penknife, he cuts a small square in the paper.

  'And if someone were to look through there, what would he see?'

  'The same street,' comes the reply.

  The painter cuts several squares in the paper.

  'Just as each of these holes contains within it the whole view of the same street, so each of us contains in our soul the same universe,' he says.

  And all of us applaud the lovely image he has found.

  The Music Coming from the Chapel

  On the day of my birthday, the universe gave me a present which I would like to share with my readers.

  In the middle of a forest near the small town of Azereix, in south-west France, there is a tree-covered hill. With the temperature nudging 40degC, in a summer when nearly five thousand people have died in hospital because of the heat, we look at the fields of maize almost ruined by the drought, and we don't much feel like walking. Nevertheless, I say to my wife:

  'Once, after I dropped you off at the airport, I decided to explore this forest. I found a really pretty walk. Would you like me to show you?'

  Christina sees something white in the middle of the trees and asks what it is.

  'It's a hermitage,' I say, and tell her that the path passes right by it, but that on the one occasion I was there, the hermitage was closed. Accustomed as we are to the mountains and the fields, we know that God is everywhere and that there is no need for us to go into a man-made building in order to find him. Often, during our long walks, we pray in silence, listening to the voice of nature, and understanding that the invisible world always manifests itself in the visible world. After a half-hour climb, the hermitage appears before us in the middle of the wood, and the usual questions arise. Who built it? Why? To which saint is it dedicated?

  And as we approach, we hear music and singing, a single voice that seems to fill the air about us with joy. 'The other time I was here, there weren't any loudspeakers,' I think, finding it strange that someone should be playing music to attract visitors on such a little-used track.

  But this time, the door of the hermitage is open. We go in, and it is like entering a different world: the chapel lit by the morning light; an image of the Immaculate Conception on the altar; three rows of pews; and, in one corner, in a kind of ecstasy, a young woman of about twenty, playing her guitar and singing, with her eyes fixed on the image before her.

  I light three candles, as I usually do when I enter a church for the first time (one for me, one for my friends and readers, and one for my work). I look back. The young woman has noticed our presence, but she simply smiles and continues playing.

  A sense of paradise seems to descend from the heavens. As if she understood what was going on in my heart, the young woman combines music with silence, now and again pausing to say a prayer.

  And I am aware that I am experiencing an unforgettable moment in my life, the kind of awareness we often only have once the magic moment has passed. I am entirely in the moment, with no past, no future, merely experiencing the morning, the music, the sweetness, the unexpected prayer. I enter a state of worship and ecstasy, and gratitude for being alive. After many tears, and what seems to me an eternity, the young woman stops playing. My wife and I get up and thank her. I say that I would like to send her a present for having filled my soul with peace that morning. She says that she goes there every morning and that this is her way of praying. I insist that I would like to give her a present. She hesitates, but finally gives me the address of a convent.

  The following day, I send her one of my books and, shortly afterwards, receive a reply, in which she says that she left the hermitage that day with her soul flooded with joy, because the couple who came in had shared her worship and shared, too, in the miracle of life.

  In the simplicity of that small chapel, in the young woman's voice, in the morning light that filled everything, I understood once again that the greatness of God always reveals itself in the simple things.

  The Devil's Pool

  I'm looking at a lovely natural pool near the village of Babinda in Australia. A young Aborigine comes over to me.

  'Be careful you don't slip,' he says.

  The small pool is surrounded by rocks, apparently quite safe to walk on.

  'This place is called the Devil's Pool,' the boy goes on. 'Many years ago, Oolona, a beautiful Aborigine girl who was married to a warrior from Babinda, fell in love with a
nother man. They fled into these mountains, but the husband found them. The lover escaped, but Oolona was murdered here in these waters. Ever since then, Oolona thinks that every man who comes near is her lost love, and she kills him with her watery embrace.'

  Later on, I ask the owner of the small hotel about the Devil's Pool.

  'It might just be superstition,' he says, 'but the fact is that eleven tourists have died there in the last ten years, and they were all men.'

  The Solitary Piece of Coal

  I read in an on-line newspaper on the internet that, on 10 June 2004, in Tokyo, a man was found dead in his pyjamas.

  So far, so good. I think that most people who die in their pyjamas (a) either died in their sleep, which is a blessing, or (b) were with their family or in a hospital bed, meaning that death did not arrive suddenly, and they all had time to get used to 'the Unwanted Guest', as the Brazilian poet, Manuel Bandeira, called it.

  The news item went on to say that, when he died, the man was in his bedroom. That cancels out the hospital hypothesis, leaving the possibility that he died in his sleep, without suffering, without even realizing that he wouldn't live to see the morning light again.

  However, there remains one other possibility: that he was attacked and killed.

  Anyone who knows Tokyo also knows that, although it is a vast city, it is also one of the safest places in the world. I remember once stopping with my Japanese publishers for a meal before driving on into the interior of Japan. All our cases were on the back seat of the car. I immediately said how dangerous this was; someone was bound to pass, see our luggage, and make off with our clothes and documents and everything else. My publisher smiled and told me not to worry; he had never known such a thing to happen in his entire life (and, indeed, nothing did happen to our luggage, although I spent the whole of supper feeling tense).