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A lost Child

Rosemary is a young girl with brown eyes, blond locks of gold and a lovely, tender and modest smile on her face. She comes from the ghettos of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and has been adopted by a Dutch politician of Labor and his wife that is a psychotherapist.

Her biological mother was a prostitute and a drug addict that has never been able to take care of her at a very young age and she has never known her father. Even though her foster parents were kind to her she kept on feeling left out and alone within the Dutch society.

She could not live at home any longer and was first sent to a psychiatric clinic and afterwards to a children’s home for children that were difficult to raise. Her sister who is also an adopted girl from India has been brought to children’s homes as she was heavy on soft drugs.

Rosemary cries every night out of sadness of being left alone and abandoned by her real parents who were living in poverty in the ghettos of Rio de Janeiro.

While being abandoned she feels often fearful, alone and even though she wants to give love and to be loved she seems unable to. She misses her real mother and doesn’t know anything about her father.

When she cries herself at sleep every night she wakes up having nightmares. Most of the time she is lost in the suburbs of Brazil and doesn’t know where to go to while drugs dealers, criminals, pimps and youth gangs are threatening her with her existence. She sleeps under a bridge and when it’s raining she doesn’t know where to go to when the police will remove her from the dry place under the bridge. In her dreams she runs while getting more and more exhausted.

When she wakes up the whole of her body is shaking and it takes minutes before she realizes there’s nothing going on.

Caribbean Soul

Nevertheless, for the first time in her life she has found a friend. He came from the Caribbean.

Rosemary realized from the beginning that he was a highly spiritual, sensitive person. And someone that is always eager to help somebody else. Always being a happy and shining personality.

Sometimes the social workers of the children’s home called him lazy, naïf, stupid or were just making fun of his ways. Something she thought was power abusive and of which she wanted to make it stop for him but she didn’t know how to do it. Also perhaps she didn’t want to be the next victim.

They did encourage him, however, to play sports within the Dutch running team for which he was asked one day. The greatness he had to recognize the stigma that has been put upon him she will never forget. He just told the Dutch running coach to go and search for somebody else while this was not his ambition. She was so terribly proud at him!

She would always take him as a great example on how to deal with those kind of things. He became her mentor and her best friend.

Within the children’s homes she first found a thing as love, soul and brotherhood which she never had known before. The boy helped her to get in touch with her own spirituality again and was one of the greatest masters of wisdom and truth-seeking she has ever had in her life.

One day she remembered being together in a coffee bar in Amsterdam. “Do you see the people looking us?” he whispered in her ear.

““It’s because of you as being here as a light colored women with me as being a black man. It wouldn’t have been any problem if it would be the other way round. White man had slavery woman for many years in history.” She had to acknowledge some people where indeed staring at us.”

“And its Amsterdam for God sake”, he said. “Please never tell me there’s no such thing as racism”, he continued, “It goes deep down and far in Western human history and has been embedded in our culture for hundreds of years”.

He was her best friend and she felt sad to see him hurt that badly. She cried softly from within the deepest of her heart

Moroccan Nights

One day Rosemary fell in love with a boy from Morocco that came to live within the group.

She enjoyed living in a culture different from her own while she trained self-discipline, the living from the heart and altruism. They had many long conversations about shame, dignity and tolerance.

For the first time in her life she felt what it is like to be respected and loved by someone else. As a result she also thrived in terms of self-confidence.

The philosophical depth of her new life did her much good. She also developed a wider interest in Eastern philosophy and after a trip to India and China she became a Buddhist. As long as she could remember she always had been interested in other people, their cultures and origins. When she asked him about his point of view on the Sharia he came up with a satisfying answer.

The Islam is a beautiful rose with petals, strain or thorns. If you get the thorns then it’s your job in life to fight. The same way as you need to fight sometimes to survive at the orphanage her and defend yourself against evil and enemies. She would love him like she had never loved before.

He has taught her how to respect modest Islamic traditions, while training discipline, behaving with dignity and practicing altruism. Together they watched movies, had dinners, were talking, laughing and dancing for hours and hours.

Every day Rosemary learned more about the divinity, beauty and otherworldliness of the ancient Islam.

The Wisdom of the Soul

 Rosemary became a practicing Buddhist from which she learned how to live with the heart because of the many hours she spent on meditation.

In Buddhism there’s a different conception of the human soul than within the Platonic western notion of the soul which she thought was actually quite uninteresting, not saying much and just leading people towards manmade idealistic constructions of reality that exclude much of the human beings all around us during daily life.

The soul, in many religious, philosophical and mythological traditions is the essence of a living thing. Buddhism teaches that all everything in the cosmos is changing all the time. She has been reading much in the books of the Dalai Lama on Tibetan Buddhism and on Zen Buddhism.

The children within the orphanages loved to speak about these things when they were together drinking a cup of coffee or tea.

A real artist does not follow the path of the majority but creates his own way whereby defining the future instead of being a victim of what happened in the past.

Music is the intelligence through which the secrets of life flow through us. It connects us with the past and present by being in the current moment.

To feel what’s going on in the minds and hearts of the people that’s what makes the real genius in the artist.

She would forever remain thankful about their wise lessons on love, abundance, passion, tolerance, respect, dignity, and everything else you need to survive within this world.