Cairo, the 2nd July,2009

"More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacy of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs - all this resinuous, unretractable earth."

Jane Hirshfield, "Optimism"

• Like those trees, I let my leaves floating like mad dragons on the air and, so often, being damaged by storms and strong winds that never spare my heart shattered into a million pieces. I float with all kinds of tempests and then wait until the dark times have passed and a new sun arises. My leaves get dry, ironed by my own hands and reborn even more beautiful than before.
• We cannot protect ourselves from life's dark times and still we can build castles with the ugly stones we find on our way (like genius portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa used to say) and iron our own damaged leaves at the end of each new storm.
• Adapting ourselves to life's beautiful and ugly surprises and always searching new directions to the accomplishment of our dreams is not just a wise thing to do but the only way to LIVE, as opposite of just surviving.