Written April 2013
Paulo Coelho’s influence on her is unmistakable.
This is especially true when it comes to the idea of living the moment, a pervading theme in many of her poems, sometimes even to the point of frustration when she cannot accomplish it.
In Coelho’s best-selling book, there is a scene in which the hero is headed across the desert with the aim of finding a treasure near the pyramids in pursuit of his fate. War is being waged nearby among the tribes. The hero and the caravan he is traveling is on the verge of reaching an oasis.
This a stage in his journey from his first contentment as a sheep herder. He was convinced to travel to the pyramids but made it only so far before his small savings were stolen, though he eventually made out by helping a crystal merchant. At this stage in his quest, he travelled by caravan towards what he is assuming his ultimate goal.
They are camped outside the oasis after struggling through the desert and the threat of violence.
“The boy was quiet. He was at home with the silence of the desert, and he was content to just look at the trees,” says this brief passage that is echoed in several of her calmer poems, from the church bells and the shadow of trees she sees hanging in the church yard next to her apartment building.
In many ways, she reminds me of the hero of book. She is on some quest to achieve her fulfillment just as the boy is and has many of the same setbacks.
Just prior to finding the oasis, the boy and others were camped out with fires, fearful of attack, and yet out of this spung the native wisdom of a camel driver from which she appears to have taken her person philosophy.
The camel driver seemed not to be concerned with the threat of war.
“I’m alive,” he said to the boy. “When I am easting, that’s all I think about. If I’m on the march, I just concentrate on marching. If I have to fight, it will be just as good a day to die as any other.”
This fatalism runs through all of her poems as well – both in the negative and the positive. She like the boy in the book seems to believe there is something at the end of her journey that she is fated to achieve. At the same time, when she does not achieve it, she seems to think she’s fated not to, or that it takes more than just working hard.
The boy in the book works hard, but there is a certain level of luck associated with it, and a sense of inevitably. He will get to his destination despite the obstacles, and I have to wonder if she thinks the same way.
But she clearly is seeking the peace camel driver has.
“I don’t live in either my past or my future,” the camel driver told the boy. “I’m interested only in the present. If you concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. You’ll see that there is life in the desert, that there are stars in the heavens, and that tribesman fight because they are part of the human race. Life will always be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living right now.”
Over and over her poems reverberate with this sentiment
“To stop filling the outside spaces with words because I was missing the moment of the calm; of the rare quiet.”
In another poem, she seems to reflect the boy in the desert, too, when she writes, “Pause, and breathe, and look around me and take stock of what it is I have…The moment. Nothing else is real. And nothing else will ever be.”
This idea is reenforced in yet another of her poems: “Because all there is is the moment, beautiful, true, and that reminds me why I breathe.”
In yet another poem she writer, “In life, we have moments, quick, shocking, unexpected, beautiful and awe-ful, terrifying, trysts of what we want and what deceives us… there are moments we feel the awe that is with us. And just for a moment we just let it be.”
But that same moment isn’t always positive. “It's only a moment that takes one from this life into the hell of the next, be it alive or dead.”
This somewhat echoing the camel driver’s comment about being a good day to die.
But it is clear, the moment is one of the most important pieces of her philosophy, something that can be stolen or preserved, such as in her love poem when she wrote about denying her love an important moment: “After having inadvertently been important enough to deprive you of the moment that would have meant the mending of two worlds, for just the moment, immortal.”
And she clearly struggled to live up to this philosophy.
“I'm spending too much time thinking about thinking, which seems to defeat the whole notion of "letting go" and living in the moment and such.”
And again, she writes: They say the key is to live in the moment. So, this moment, the city is gone. And if tomorrow is not guaranteed, it may be gone, forever.”
As I read Coelho’s book, the more convinced I am that she is the boy traveling through the world seeking enlightenment, seeking to live in the moment, seeking whatever it is fate has waiting for her around each new corner.
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