The first sentence on page 117 of <The Alchemist> is “Life attracts life.” which is said by the alchemist. This book is full of philosophy, so this sentence made me think a lot.
        During the discussion of our reading group, I ask them if they had any story between animals and human beings. I found that they all loved animals very much. We share with each other the novels about animals such as <Charlotte’s Web>, <Black Beauty> as well as the pets we’ve ever had. Sometimes we found that’s so much fun to play with our pets, but we may also be guilty when our pets died because we didn’t take enough care of them.
        Animals are good friends with human beings. Humans have almost 18-thousand-year history of petting animals. But sometimes I can’t stop ask myself: did we human beings really treated with the animals as our friends?
        Animals and human beings are both organism, we are all lives. But during the long evolutionary history, human beings have been quite different from other organisms. The God gave human beings super smart brain, emotion and feeling, talent to use tools… but we have forgotten so many talents which animals have. We cannot communicate with the nature; we kill other lives because of our desire instead of surviving. Human beings may not realize that evil will be rewarded with evil. The evil we did to other organisms may revenge back to ourselves. It’s time to take action to protect the animals, because they also have right to survive.  

Well, the part we read this week is actually really interesting. Since this is the first time I have ever read about or even seen about the culture in Africa (well it is in a desert right?), so it really interested me about their traditional culture. And here I’m gonna post a quotation from the book which is on page 91.

This paragraph really shows an interesting situation that the women dressed in black means they got married. And this actually reminds me something about the tradition in India. Indians also have something to define if a woman is married. Here is the website about this.

http://www.indiacn.com/jiemi/8169.html

As we can see in the article that the author wrote on the website, the Indians like to use nevus to show their blessing to the people. The nevus is pointed on a person’s forehead and it is made of cinnabar – a kind of ore that can be used as pigment. This kind of nevus which is formed by people by using cinnabar, sticky rice and roseleaves is called “Bindiya”. And it represents the blessing from their family, and wish the one who got this nevus can deal all the troubles they are facing and escape from all the dangers. The color of the cinnabar is always red. But nowadays, the young people have a more convenient way to do it, is to use some stickers that look like the nevus and stick it on their forehead. Of course, the stickers have more choices on color, which is easier for the girls to match the color of the nevus to their clothes. But there actually are some special meanings of two colors, red and black. If you put a red nevus on your forehead, that means you are married; if you put a black one on your forehead, that means you are under age. And in Thailand, a white nevus on your forehead means your husband is dead.

Different colors of nevus do represent different meanings. And it’s really interesting.