Witch of Portobello

Paulo Coelho never ceases to amaze me. While his latest, The
Witch of Portobello, is a bit weirder than usual in my opinion, it’s
no less thought provoking than his usual. Here are a few excerpts that
spoke to me.

“What is a teacher? I’ll tell you: it isn’t someone who teaches
something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in
order to discover what she already knows.”

…

“I’ve always been a very restless person. I work hard, spend too much
time looking after my son, I dance like a mad thing, I learned
calligraphy, I go to courses on selling, I read one book after another.
But that’s all a way of avoiding those moments when nothing is
happening, because those blank spaces give me a feeling of absolute
emptiness, in which not a single crumb of love exists. My parents have
always done everything they could for me, and I do nothing but
disappoint them. But here, during the time we spent together,
celebrating nature and the Great Mother, I’ve realized that those empty
spaces were starting to get filled up. They were transformed into pauses
– the moment when the man lifts his hand from the drum before bringing
it down again to strike hard. I think I can leave now…”



…

Everything is at once so simple and so complicated! It’s simple because
all it takes is a change of attitude: I’m not going to look for
happiness anymore. From now on, I’m independent; I see life through my
eyes and not through other people’s. I’m going in search of the
adventure of being alive.

And it’s complicated: Why am I not looking for happiness when everyone
has taught me that happiness is the only goal worth pursuing? Why am I
going to risk taking a path that no one else is taking?

After all, what is happiness?

Love, they tell me. But love doesn’t bring and never has brought
happiness. On the contrary, it’s a constant state of anxiety, a
battlefield; it’s sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if
we’re doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.

All right then, peace. Peace? If we look at the Mother, she’s never at
peace. The winter does battle with the summer, the sun and the moon
never meet, the tiger chases the man, who’s afraid of the dog, who
chases the cat, who chases the mouse, who frightens the man.

Money brings happiness. Fine. In that case, everyone who earns enough to
have a high standard of living would be able to stop working. But then
they’re more troubled than ever, as if they were afraid of losing
everything. Money attracts money, that’s true. Poverty might bring
unhappiness, but money won’t necessarily bring happiness.

I spent a lot of my life looking for happiness; now what I want is joy.
Joy is like sex – it begins and end. I want pleasure. I want to be
contended, but happiness? I no longer fall into that trap

…..



Reprogram yourself every minute of each day with thoughts that make you
grow. When you’re feeling irritated or confused, try to laugh at
yourself. Laugh out loud at this woman tormented by doubts and
anxieties, convinced that her problems are the most important thing in
the world. Laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation, at the fact
that despite being a manifestation of the Mother, you still believe God
is a man who lays down the rules. Most of our problems stem from just
that – from following rules.

….

“…Like love for example. People either feel it or they don’t, and
there isn’t a force in the world that can make them feel it. We can
pretend that we love each other. We can get used to each other. We can
live a whole lifetime of friendship and complicity, we can bring up
children, have sex every night, reach orgasm, and still feel that
there’s a terrible emptiness about it all, that something important is
missing.”