Haiti

We cry for our fellow living beings suffering in Haiti's tragedy! A respectful silence seems to be the only appropriate reaction at this time. Insane religious people do say God punished this poor country for its Voodoo practices. Others claim it is Haiti’s karma to suffer such disaster, on top of its chronic poverty.
I listened to a man saying in a radio talk show that we should all donate to the relief effort to alleviate our karma and not reincarnate in Haiti ourselves. Such nonsense! These beliefs do discard Gods love and human dignity at once!
Let us pray and love as we act now and when needed!

Who we are and what unite us

We are gathered in wonder around the goodness of life and its magnificent frolic.
Our consciousnesses awake to the richness of being a part of this event and want to act on it for better.
This participation starts with appreciation and care and becomes freedom of choice, not only between two options, but many good ones, plus the ones we may add to the play.
Even those who choose in a disorganized way will learn through their choices and contribute to the progress toward what we see as the good goal of life.
Belief or not belief in God is indifferent to us. Some believe in God some don’t, but we all believe in the Human Spirit.
Some of us like to link ourselves to a historical chain of similar understandings, some do remain in the religions of their families and some prefer to invent their own religion as they go on.
Some do believe in angels and miracles, some are materialistic.
We have together agreed to be pacifist, ecumenical, open to all, ecologically minded and socially engaged.
We also have agreed not to organize ourselves into a structured religion, nor adopt a hierarchy or religious titles.
We opted to free our vocabulary of words like lord, worship and similar ones.
We recognize no absolute truth but Life, no holy book but poetry, no rule or law but love.
For us there are no outsiders or insiders, we are all ONE: humans, no human animals, plants, minerals etc.
For us the perfect unity to the whole is only manifest through the individual, which is larger and more important then any community, which only fits as it empowers and highlight the individual.
We are anonymous and spread all over the place but we share this discovery of Life through our daily lives and, because of it, become quite visible to all. We are everybody in a moment or another. We are you!
Onaldo Alves Pereira

Near to the heart of God

“There is a place of quiet rest, near to the heart of God” says the old hymn.
Such pious geography of the spiritual real can be beautiful and comforting. It all depends on the strings attached or not to the heavy laden figures we sing about. Sometimes, beauty and emotions are used to soak into our spirits a whole load of theological “truth”. A private God, whose heart beats according to the doctrines written in “our book”. Coming near to this vitiated “heart”, implies giving in into an exclusive path of faith and practice. Such a heart invites nearness because it also pulls away the disagreeing ones, the others, the godless, and the unbelievers. Such a heart could never be a resting place if only for the chosen ones.
Oh, yes, I can sing this song with joy, but only if sure that there is no place away from the sung heart, no one strange to its life giving work and, no possibility for a estrangement from it.
Believers or nonbelievers, religious of whatever religions or non religious, all are life responding to Life, life within Life, Life itself.
If we can sing this song without fencing and labeling the place – the place of life – near to the heart of God – Life – then we are free from the sugary manipulations of religion / power at the most primitive level.
Onaldo Alves Pereira

Dry season afternoon

We are surrounded by struggling trees, leaves falling and bare limbs stretched in the dusty dry air as if begging for help. Dry brown vines fall, melting down from tree branches.
A green happy stain in the dry ochre background, against all odds, the vegetable garden grows at its best.
This is mid dry season here.
The air humidity is below 15% and breathing hurts. Hot afternoons follow chilly mornings. The surfaces of everything crack. There is a soothing sadness about all of this.
My sleepy mind can’t function well and enters a dream world, half unspoken prayer, half liquid scenes of the place where I am. I doze away.
Onaldo Alves Pereira

Quincas died - 1969

Mané and Quincas, the two sexagenarian homeless guys living with us slept on the floor, on soft mattresses, made by my mother with an especial kind of grass, harvested from a neighbors’ swamp, where it grew wild. The freshly made beds smelt great. It provided perfect sleep alright.
Daybreak brought life back into business. I woke with a weird noise, as if a cat was being strangled. Quincas was having an attack and my father, holding his hands, whispered a shaky Ave Maria prayer.
Quincas died and was buried before God called it a day. A sad day!

Hunger

It was over a year of only one, increaseling smaller meal a day in our home – or, more precisely, 621 days, or meals. I did count the meals, not the days. After a while, my calendar notebook was made of such fine information as:
250th meal – ate when the sun draw just a line of shade on the fruitless avocado tree and we had only one guest over for supper, what means we could have been left with more refried beans for us, had not the guest really loved mothers cooking.
Mother and father got sick together. She had, what later, two days before she died, we found out was cancer. My father struggled with the same neuromuscular disease now I suffer myself. Then, daddy – papai – decided this was time to tell our family, the two of them and me, we had no more food. Because of me, he said, he had hidden the real situation until food was over for good. Now I had to face it, prepared or not. I was 13 years old by then. He told me that the time would come, God willing my survival, when I should wipe off the slate and start anew.

Cats

Cats are around me all day long. Sometimes they make my agenda without even consulting me. If I open a book and one of the cats thinks it makes a good bed, goodbye reading.
Eating can also be a challenge. As soon as I help myself to some food here comes the eight cats meowing. Each of them has its own peculiar preferences and methods of approaching me for a bite. Amarelinho loves fruits, specially papaya and mango. The older black mammy, Pretinha, is very polite and won’t eat until everybody else eats.
A few years ago I would not allow anyone to rule me this way, never had time for more than a passing pet on my beloved felines. Now, as my body decided to pin me down to a place and completely change my notion of time, these beautiful beings, the cats, help me to survive another day.