"Artists can color the sky red
because they know it's blue."
-Jules Feiffer

Arabian Nights Let me share with you a tale. It's about a boy whom at the age of nine wrote a story for school. For a nine-year-old, the story was good. It involved three animals on an adventure through the desert. Each brought to the journey their own unique skills, without which none of them could have made the trek. It was a story about working together to achieve success. The boy's teacher liked the story. It had a complex plot for a student of nine and she recognized it took some thoughtful organization and planning. She gave the boy an A+. In his heart, the boy knew he wanted to write stories when he grew up. As the boy grew older, he held on to his dream. Opportunities readily afforded themselves to him. He wrote a skit in junior high; a modern adaptation of the first act of Romeo and Juliet when he was sixteen; and in high school wrote for an underground paper that parodied local events. It was as if the universe were working in tandem with him to realize his dream of becoming a writer. The boy entered college. In his first quarter of school he took theatre and English classes. His theatre instructor was impressed with his sense of stagecraft, both on and off the stage. His English teacher was impressed with his writing, and the two instructors - good friends - invited the boy to attend a playwriting workshop they were co-chairing. For the workshop he wrote a play; a comedy that actually made people laugh. A staged reading was held of the boy's play. From the reading a full-scale production developed that was entered into a national competition. His teacher - the one who'd planted an A+ on his story when he was nine - attended a performance. She beamed as she told him afterward she nearly peed herself laughing. Life, thought the boy, couldn't get any better. The boy, rapidly becoming a man, by chance stumbled into a job at a bookstore. It was a good fit. He excelled at the job as he had a knack for remembering titles and authors and where on the many aisles of shelves they could be found. His manager gave him more and more hours, until he didn't have enough time in his day for school; so he put his education on hold. Something clicked, and it wasn't his mouse. As luck would have it, from the deepest recesses of his heart he'd recovered what he'd always wanted to do; he wanted to write. As one year blurred into the next, the boy was promoted up the bookstore food chain. Soon he'd all but forgotten his ambition to become a writer. He lived comfortably, and by all outward appearances was content. But in his heart there remained a nagging unsettling feeling something was not quite right. He thought maybe his heart was telling him he was ill, but was pronounced in fine health by his physician. Still, the feeling of unease remained. Then one day a copy of Dr. Gerald G. Jampolsky's book Love is Letting Go of Fear inexplicably made it onto his bedside table, and the boy - now very much a man - picked it up and couldn't put it down. He read it in one sitting. The next day, he received notice the bookstore was going to close. At first, he was seized with panic. In the course of the day, though, panic was replaced with relief; fear with excitement. He looked at it as a great opportunity, and incredibly, he was at peace with it. Now, he didn't know what things were to come, but the inner peace - the love he felt for this unexpected change - sustained and amazed him. He hit the Help Wanted ads and put together a resume. He enrolled in an HTML class because it was 1999 and the internet was hot. He sent out resumes and received rejection. He sent out query letters, and got nothing in response. He began to suspect the universe wasn't working with him. He became discouraged, but his heart was strangely at peace, so he persevered. He developed his own website just to keep in practice, but having no content to fill it with, he wrote his own. Something clicked, and it wasn't his mouse. As luck would have it, from the deepest recesses of his heart he'd recovered what he'd always wanted to do; he wanted to write. The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho (HarperSanFrancisco, $18.00) is about that certain click one gets when pursuing his/her true path. Set in Saharan Africa sometime between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, it involves recognizing omens along life's journey that can be used to achieve dreams. It is about the interconnectedness of all things; the "Soul of the World" from which all things spring. It is that common bond which makes alchemy - the changing of lead to gold; adversity to opportunity - possible. Through the story's protagonist, a Spanish boy named Santiago, Coelho guides the reader through the process of recognizing opportunities that will ultimately lead one to know and trust their heart. In so doing, the author puts us in the shoes of Santiago, and himself in the role of the alchemist, although in the interconnected world of Coelho they're one and the same. Coelho writes in Portuguese, so it's hard to judge his writing from a work that's been translated to English. But suffice to say, The Alchemist is original and thoroughly enjoyable. The author comes off a bit heavy-handed in his presentation of some concepts in the story, but bear in mind he hasn't written a novel; The Alchemist is a fable, and as such is intent on delivering the writer's truth via a platform of fiction. It's this truth - philosophy, if you will - that gives the fable weight; its characters that give it soul; a combination of both that fill it with magic. All the magic of an Arabian night. posted 01/24/03 TOP