Before and after you became an author, you continue to travel around the world. Which travel was most influential to you?
Today. All wanderings are important since you can extract from anything in life a teaching, something that will make sense to you.
You have to look at life itself is a pilgrimage. Every day is different, every day can have a magic moment, but we don’t see the opportunity, because we think: ‘Oh this is boring I’m just commuting to work.’ But we are all on a pilgrimage whether we like it or not and the target, or goal, the real Santiago, if you like, is death. You must get as much as you can from the journey, because – in the end – the journey is all you have. It doesn’t matter what you accumulate in terms of material wealth, because you are going to die anyway, so why not live? When you realize that you can be brave and that is the first tenant of any spiritual quest – to take risks.
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Come near to God and he will come near to you – James 4:8
Blessings Tania
Thank you so much Paulo Coelho. I pray everyday for you to continue to have good health and happiness so that you can write more and more.
Best regards,
Hao Lam
About half a hour ago, I opened and started reading a book I just purchased yesterday. Before logging onto this blog, the last words I read were these:
“(This book) invites pilgrims to think about…what it is in a pilgrimage to come to a new frontier in your relationship with God. People go on pilgrimage…because of the sense that they are approaching, perhaps even crossing, a boundary. There is a new landscape hinted at, inviting you to come and begin to inhabit it. But the invitation is at the same time a disorienting and frightening one, requirig a loss and a risk. Eliot writes famously in ‘Little Gidding’ about letting go of ‘what you think you came for’. and goes on to note that, as well as Little Gidding, ‘There are other places/Which are also the world’s end.’ Pilgrimage is always oing to be towards that ‘world’s end’ that is still somehow within the world, to the placE where…God has decided to make his name dwell.
“What we call holy in the world – a person, a place, a set of words or pictures – is so becase it is a transitial place, a borderland, where the completely foreign is brought together with the familiar…smewhere that looks as if it belongs in the world we aree at home in, but in fact…leads directly into strangeness.”
from the introduction to “Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons of the Virgin” by Rowan Williams
So, yes, to take risks! That, indeed, is the first tenet of the quest: the willingness to let go of the know, to renounce what you think you came here for, and thereby set out into the realm of the unknown.
I think I am at this place – this shadowy borderland region – at this particular time in my life: on this verry day, in this very hour. And funny – I just thought I was taking a vacation to London! Seems I went to sleep last night in the Known World, and woke this morning in the belly of a ship, bound for this nether-region Williams terms as the World’s End. It cold be Little Gidding, it could be Norfolk’s Walsingham, it could be Santiago…. The name used to designate the destination matters little. The journey is everything and all.
Thank you, Paulo Coelho, for your words, which have been, and continue to be, like the winds that drive this ship.
Sincerely,
Savita
I really liked an interview, was it in Arendal, where you said something like; ‘I’m not looking just to have a life after death, but I want to have a life now’. It’s so true. Live here-and-now, every moment. I believe also this was the point in the poem Thelma shared yesterday. Don’t look elsewhere. Be right here-and-now, and make the out most of it. Although, at the same time, I dream about something even more glorious to reveal itself in the future.