Explorations

It’s been a week since I landed in Madrid, so it’s probably high time I showed up to share my current state of affairs.

The Crossing was pretty smooth, as the spell I had been weaving for months had assured. I went through passport control in Portugal, a country not exactly famous for militar rigidity, and very luckily, the policeman who interviewed me with the kooky Iberian accent was having another problem with somebody from Southern Asia who had lots of irregularities. Like a red hot air balloon, I breezed through the halls of Lisbon’s airport and caught my connection flight to Spain, where no Customs whatsoever was waiting for me.

My el-cheapo PVC bag was torn, and I made a complaint at the Barajas arrivals lobby. Very efficiently, unlike anything else in Brazil, they replaced me with a polyester Samsonite. Shining red. Life’s good when you master The Secret.

Madrid is an extremely developped city, unlike anywhere I have physically been to, even Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. The Metro reaches about everywhere, facilities are close at hand even in my working-class district, and once you go through all the paperwork, you have access to all social security services for free. I have rights to integral medical assistance, for instance, but alas not to a legal job. I’m dying to get the chance to study in Escuela Superior de Canto, a prestigious classical singing school renowned worldwide and also sponsoured by the Government. I’ll check it tonight. Let’s see.

Madrilean people certainly don’t make me feel like an alien. There is a feeling of cosmopolitanism, hospitality, and curiosity on me everywhere I go, but the most starkling characteristic of the natives is certainly that they feel so fucking good about themselves all the time. They have a lot to teach us across the Atlantic, I can tell. They care for their youth, their public venues, their neighbourhood, their common future and common features. And they despise worriness. I’ll be learning new character traits here, I’m sure.

Fortunately, I arrived here with a good man to look after my first days. Jose took a brief one-week holiday to stay with me, take me to places, get me registered for social security, introduce me to his friends, and buy stuff with me. The feeling of gratitude has obviously taken over me, and I don’t want to cut the lucky streak, so I’ll keep tuned to the waves that bring me so many blessings.

Now I need to look forward to the next stage of settling down—finding a job, even if illegal, getting involved with my career again, making my own friends. Because I certainly didn’t came here to be somebody else’s dependent housewife.

We still don’t have Internet in the flat, so I don’t have enough access to Tribe to know how you are doing, but I hope you are doing terrific, and keeping the vibes positive all the time!

I miss Sampa, and I miss all of you. I have never been so happy.

The Watchful Eye

My first yoga teacher was an extremely conservative catholic lady. Celibate (although married) and very resistant to the notion of reincarnation or metempsychosis, she loved quoting the bible all the time, and I resisted everything she said. One of her favourite extracts from the book was the heeding, ‘pray and watch’. I realize now I’ve been forgetting the second half of that advice when I really shouldn’t.

Last night I watched ‘The Secret’ again. I like to get my fix every now and then, because living in Society you inevitably get caught in the victim game more often than it’s healthy, and attitude and mood, the two molds in which our Future is shaped, need constant washing. And ‘The Secret’ is my favourite practice in Spiritual Hygiene.

As I whispered to myself my favourite quotes from the movie together with the stars, I realized how devastating it was for me to give up São Paulo for the next phase in the story of my life. São Paulo means to me so much more than two years. It was liberation, emancipation, soul retrieval and deliverance from everything that ever made me stuck. It was an actual rebirth, because I only began to feel alive and glad for that when I moved to there. And to move on to where I long to be, with my sweetheart, I needed to sacrifice that. Let go of that phase of my life, in order to embrace the new.

Truth is, I didn’t consider that this would have such a bad consequence, such a high price. One day after leaving São Paulo, my Basic Self—that part of us that reacts to change unexpectedly, that clings to safety devices and wrecks havoc when we take a step without its consent—attracted me a car accident. From there, things naturally spiral downwards, until you realize you got taken on the downhill speeding sleigh ride. Seven days in the hospital, life back in the Rio de Janeiro suburbs, misunderstandings with a translation client and lots of tiny bits of the worst of life, kept attracting more of the bad stuff, because every now and then you inevitably go back to conditional thinking—you believe you are what you see around you, dooming yourself to experience more and more of that all the time. You are on an unlucky streak. Until you stop, get a good cosmic shove; renovate your attitude and mood, and hop on your thoughts again, guiding them according to how they feel, and decide where you want to be taken.

The evil eye may get the best of you on occasion, but even worse over the course of events is having the good eye shut.

Pray and watch.