Paulo Coelho is Enlightening!!

So many times earlier have I picked up The Alchemist, and, fearing that my taste would not match its contents, turned away from it. People talked about the book, and I wondered how it would be. What wisdoms it contained. Still, years after it had been published, I've not read the book.

But could one run away from Paulo Coelho? When his books are everywhere, some time, some day, I had to pick up one. And I did. At the Central library in downtown Santa Barbara. I found Brida in the New Fiction section. It was a hardbound, 212 page book, with a woman's enigmatic back on the cover. The weight of the book was a deterrent, as I would have to carry it on the bus from the library along with some other books, to our house on Upper State Street.

I'm glad I decided to bear its weight anyway. Now that I have read its last page, and closed the cover, my mind is illuminated on many things. These were things normally people did not talk about. The mystical experiences of wizards and witches, the whole process of initiation of pupils into witchcraft, and the relationships that people in that world had to reckon with.

It is a straightforward story, about Brida who wants to know about magic. She meets the Magus in the forest, but he does not teach her straightaway what magic is. Brida meets her teacher Wicca, who is a good teacher, comfortable in her wordly physical beauty.

The spiritual aspects of the physical body is highlighted, that love is love, whether one is with the loved one or not. The quest of the Magus is his Soul Mate. The Soul Mate is differentiated from a worldly, physical lover. These differentiation in the end makes him distance himself physically from his oul Mate, whom he meets at the end of his journey and gains wisdom.

I would credit Coelho with the lucidity of his vision, and the love with which he wrote his novel.