Before the difficulties, two paths are presented: the one of pure and simple accommodation and the one of effort to overcome.

This defines, in the world, the losers and the winners. Winners over themselves, over adversity.

Selma was born in a Swedish agricultural property, ran by her family.

Carrying a joint defect in her left leg, at the age of three, she found herself suddenly unable to walk.

With the inert legs, she spent her childhood without much playing, listening to stories and legends told by her nanny, Kaysa.

Her grandmother, who took her here and there, used to say: Learn to fly by the thoughts.

When she saw the kids ice-skating, she recommended: Close your eyes and with the imagination ice skate throughout the universe.

At a given summer, traveling with her family to a water station, she met the wife of the captain of the ship.

At being invited to meet the vessel, Selma saw a bird-of-paradise and, by being a child of keen imagination, thought it would be capable of miracles, a fact that made her, suddenly, walk again, although she continued in a shambles, because of the pain she felt in her left leg.

At fifteen, after having dedicated all her childhood to reading, Selma decided she would be a writer and went on writing verses.

The financial situation of her family, aggravated by the illness of her father, defined the property sale, where Selma was born, grew and loved so much. 

At the age of twenty-four, with financial the help from a loan made by her brother Johan, Selma joined the school of teacher education.

She became a History teacher and promised herself she would reacquire the family property.

Thanks to her imagination, fueled by the myths, legends and stories of ghosts of her land, she wrote short stories, which were materialized in books.

Her great success, reached in 1910, came with a book that she had been challenged to write by a school principal. A book that told the history and geography of Sweden for children of pre-school.

With that, she got her intent: to regain the family property, where she resided and lived until the end of her days.

Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1910, she narrated an encounter she had with her father, disembodied, while she was sleeping on the train, on the way to Stockholm. He reminded her that she should be grateful.

For that reason, it was a speech of gratitude, in which she said to be nothing more than the mouth and pen, registering what her mind, since childhood, had received.

She talked about the great debt of gratitude which she carried in her heart. And said: Gratitude is the heaviest burden to carry. There is no way to rescue this indebted.

Selma not only overcame her own difficulties, but was a militant on the feminist causes and a convinced pacifist.

In the beginning of World War II, she helped several German intellectuals to escape, getting them Swedish visas.

The German poet Nelly Sachs was saved, by her, of being put into a concentration camp.

The great Swedish writer wrote: No one can free men of pain, but blessed is the one who makes reborn on them the courage to endure.

Spiritist Moment Team, based on
biographical data of Selma  Lagerlöf.
March 12.2015.