Writing During the Feast

I haven't felt like writing--it is as if the writing almost becomes unnecessary when I am finally at home. I don't have to write here to connect with the world around me; I am simply there, me, and all the pieces of color, wind, smells, tastes, deep loves all live with me. Writing, for me perhaps is an attempt to draw those pieces together in my nomadic life, when I am not at home--a home that paradoxically means that I am a foreigner. I am at home as an American in Greece. Not American, not Greek. Amereek. I am a Third Culture person, a person in the airport of culture.

Sounds depressing, I suppose. It is and it isn't. I am, in the deeper things, someone who has been able to choose, and yet someone who was formed deeply by Greece, in Greece, by Greeks. My life has been a glorious, mysterious conglomeration of small tragedies suspended like small creatures in the amber of deep comedy that is most purely expressed by Greece, what the ancient Greeks and the modern Greeks both are truly, underneath it, about. Also, I know that I don't really fit here--I know that the sum of my life is not a large failure to get back to Greece, though it has felt like that at times of immaturity. I want to, though. In Athens, on Sifnos, my sister and I look for a home, a place we can come back to.

But I know also that my real home is within God's will, and He has us each on a ship and asks us to learn the wind-road home, and continue to adjust our sails even past Ithaka. Ithaka is not enough, she only points to something greater by the very desire for her, perhaps the meaning behind Odysseus' second, and last odyssey to find a place that does not know what an oar is. Still, the questions remain--How do I, as an enfleshed soul, live on a ship, live 'turning my face on all I loved'  like the msytery of Sifnos' greatest poet, for all these years? Do the sounds, tastes, smells, colors, matter at all?

I do realize this time round, this nostos, that I was formed, I was brought up not only by my parents, friends, and teachers, but by the land and its people--I have a deep respect, always have, for older women, and always a slight awe, or even fear of them (I got my cheeks pinched hard a few times as a child); emotional signals are subtle for me, and the community should not be competitive. I dislike the spirit of rabid capitalism and ultra-efficiency (though at times I appreciate it). I'm totally on Captain Kirk's side. These are all things Greece instilled in me. I learned directly from the wind something of God's voice, and from the Greek sense of proportion--a small, white building with light green shutters providing a square background for a line of fig trees trained softly in human-tree organic symbiosis, into a kind of line in front of the building, the lines of the trees and building a kind of parallelism that produces a lively and ordered difference--a parallelism of polarity--and then one giant pot of red geranium providing the surprise, mirroring the unexpected we find so beautiful, so necessary, like the surprisingly particular love of God for each of us, a reminder that we are not part of a machine but part of a creation, a work of art, a home. Greece speaks truth in every line, even the fallen ones. The Greek miracle? It arises naturally--for me it seems almost inevitable because I love Greece like I love my own body.

The Greeks work hard, and they also work hard for the good of their communities and for beauty. This may surprise people who are watching the IMF issue, or who have seen the messiness, or imperfection rampant here--unfinished buildings, graffiti like a virus spreading in Athens. Yet Greeks get up extremely early and work hard as their ancestors have for millenia, hacking stumps out of the ground; the insides of homes and hotels and buildings are often spotless and extremely organized and clear of clutter. The outside, not so much. The landscaping of the National Archaeology Museum makes the place look slightly abandoned--but it isn't. They just let things grow, and people make paths through the grass or shrubs, paths that fit the pattern of communal life. And nobody yells at you for it. They live as a part of nature and don't seem to want to twist it into straight lines. It surprises the American-Germanic in me, but the part of me formed here relaxes and fits into my skin again. "Let the grass grow and the poppies will grow, too!!"

The thing I think I feel the most strongly about is the lack of competition. The Greeks aren't always focused  on vying for the highest place in a community; people are higher or lower, richer or poorer, and there is a certain appreciation, it seems, for everyone. They love to give little presents, especially to children, even strangers--chips and ice creams for TJ, who is quickly becoming a Greek. The hands of the Greeks I know are open for gifts both ways. I know nothing of Sinon, or the suspicion that made Virgil say, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." TJ senses the openness and talks to everyone he meets with his twenty words of Greek and there is appreciation, laughter, and joy in return. Walls are there to hand things over in Greece; they are there to create terraces on the mountainsides for subsistence farming, they are there to protect the path from the wind; they are there as hideouts for pigeons (little triangle-holes set in the stone); they are there for the bougainvillea to grow over; they are there for the weary traveler to sit upon. They are there to create a veranda away from the ever-present sunlight ricocheting off the blue water. Here, in an ancient culture, they are a heritage from one's ancestors; by them the mountains have been turned into farmland terraces over thousands of years, nameless gifts keeping the virgin contours of the mountains intact.

Neither socialism nor capitalism fit Greece, Maybe distributism. And Greece isn't perfect. I think one thing plaguing Greece really is  a soft mafia-ism. It fits their culture of strong family and community--it is not every man for himself, as in America, but it can be as serious a destroyer for an economy. In Athens, one can feel it...the pharmacies are the only place babyfood can be sold, for instance. This doesn't make any sense to the foreigner, until one understands that the pharmacy family and the babyfood family know the families who are in parliament, or something like that. It was a deal. Those are the gifts to beware, but these kinds aren't limited to Greece--we have our own form of mafia in America. It is just more packaged in fine terms. I don't know what regular Greeks feel about their own form, but it may seem kind of normal to them because, simply, it is built on the family connection and the head man. This is as ancient as Agamemnon, and probably just as self-absorbed as that sod was. However, the Greeks here I've spoken to seem to think that Greece is a small, easily bullied player in a banker's game. Having heard this about banks (think about the criminal bail-out in the US, look at the Occupy movements) for years now, I begin to wonder if they are right. For example, the Euro banks ("The National Bank of Greece is not Greek," one man informed us, "it is part of the Euro elite") take 3% of all credit card purchases in Greece. Why? And this is not mentioned in the media? How many people take this kind of thing into account when looking at the situation in Greece?

For me, when I was a foreign child, I was happily unaware of all this. I was aware of things, formed by things, under the radar: the smell of souvlaki wafting it's way across the beach and mixing delightfully with the smell of the sea, the particular smell of Greek bread and the taste of the water, the way the little red poppies peek out from the ever-brown grass-weeds, the wild and nutty smell of the huge beach reeds; the smile of the woman who ran the market, the wild, kind of rude kids at the bakery; the fact that vipers are small, shrunken things that move fast and strike without warning; the feeling that one was really meant to fly off with that particular wind, a Cupid wind for me as Psyche...we are indeed brought up by more than our parents, more than our churches, more than our friends. We are brought up by a million images, a million sensory and subtle interactions with the world we know as a child. Perhaps the person who loses, somehow, their forming culture, can see this more clearly--and can tell others how important everything is for a child, how dear it all is, no matter the failures within it. It makes me remember that I am part of the formation, however small, of the kids who come to play at our house; they will have some opinion of life, of women, by how I am with them.

I think of God asking us to be like children in this way--we need to take everything in of Him, just soak Him up, that we aren't primarily formed into Him by rational acuity but by small acts of openness and real experiences. It is, I think, harder if one is in an ugly culture (physically ugly, but also spiritually ugly--hypocrisy and arrogance in the 'religious' being perhaps the worst ugliness). If our culture values 'first' most highly, or 'smartest' or 'richest', we will become that as well. For me, these things have been violence in my life, like the violence of passivity has, too. Greece has a certain balance, a good balance here, and I was blessed to be formed in part by that.

God made us in our bodies and He speaks to us through the creation--some people are spoken to in the mountains, some on the back of a horse--most of us hear best, are able to be more real, at home, in the place where we were formed, where there was that first childlike love. Children who grow up with warping have the hardest time loving, and yet there are miracles here--but yes, Aquinas, God builds on nature, on us and our enfleshment. Yet, He can use even the warping or an exile to speak to us; He is everywhere and within us. I just think that there are places of beauty so profound it makes the soul sing: I was blessed enough to be formed in one of these places. Each place of beauty has a different song about the Creator to sing: I have heard a song from the pure white of the snow in Lander, and from the vastness of the Wyoming landscape, from the golden kelp in Santa Barbara; but here, in Greece, the song seems complete to me, like a dance with voices and instruments and hand-clapping. God knows this, and so I always ask, "Why the nomadic life?" I think now that God challenged me, and my sister, to dig deeply for God inside, to understand that even almost perfect beauty, in this world, is seriously flawed and can disappear like the haze over our beloved Middle Sea.

My sister and I have similar feelings, similar desires, but we have dug inside for God and suffered in different ways--looking at each of us is kind of like looking at two versions of a similar being; the small differences become the rudder movements that takes each one through different waters. She is next to my heart, one who also knows the joy and pain of seeing small remembrances, things resurrected from a childlike world lost. That is something huge, as many siblings can attest. And God uses everything, everything in our life, to speak to us, even the little biscuit packages we remember and the particular way the taverna tables slant on the gravel along the beach. We remember eating the biscuits together with a kind of pure unconcerned-ness, like the lilies of the field; we remember scrambling under the tables for bottle caps, like the merchant who found the pearls--a kind of pure concentration. No one yelled at us, either. We knew an unburdened spirit, but we didn't know courage--and perseverance through the pain in the world, in ourselves, and the most deep, the pain between ourselves and how love does indeed conquer all. We can though this give back to God, as He gives of Himself to Himself in the Trinity: through the exercise of virtue, through hard things (the hardest in ourselves) we can give something of ourselves to God. In fact, we can lay down everything in the face of those who hurt us, of those losses in our lives that demand faith. The nomadic life and a kind of permanent exile is one way, in a sense, a very gentle way.

Here, on Sifnos, it is the first time in almost forty years that I've been back in a more simple Greece, almost back in 1970's Greece, and I could now realize that all the small things I've held onto (bouganveillia in Santa Barbara, the taste of salt water, golden light, colors, certain friendships which have that openness and lack of competition or Americanesque hard edge) have been puzzle pieces that are all together here--I realized this when I could not write about it. There was too much--normally I have only small pieces to write about, and I write about them as jewels I've found. Here, I am covered with them, and I don't want to write, but to dance and sing and to just be.

And, I wonder if we are like the silver sea of olive trees here, stretching out across the hillside. The same growth process that expands and heightens the tree also serves to heal wounds; I know, for instance, that the sensitivity to beauty that was instilled in me by Greek land, sea, and people, helped my spirit expand; it also, now, helps me heal not only myself, but others, because beauty is also truth.

It is, truly, a foretaste of heaven--it is itself a piece of heaven--a large piece. I know now what I didn't know all those years ago, that this is pointing to a renewed earth.

A renewed earth--that brought about by the fire of the Holy Spirit. In Lander, the Sunday before we left, it was Pentecost Sunday and I remembered again the Holy Spirit in that particular way. As a child in Greece, I had a special devotion to the Holy Spirit; I would go out into the forests of Anatolia College and sit in the sun on a particular rock in the sun amongst the pines, and listen for Him. I heard Him in the wind, with that soft whistling, brush-like sound that the pine needles make. I would be there for hours at a time. It was my touchstone, the center meaning of me, and I loved Him and He loved me.

When we left, I couldn't figure out how to find Him again without that place. Nothing in the place we came to seemed to speak that way, so I despaired and the road back was harder on Him than on me. Many years later, I was sitting there in Lander at the Pentecost service and thinking of Him again, but rather abstractly--red for the Holy Spirit, okay.

The next Sunday was Mass in Athens at the Catholic cathedral. For some reason, it was Pentecost Sunday again. The red vestments were lost in the beauty of that place, the loftiness of it, the old stones and the home-smell of Greece--spots of red, though, like the wild poppies, the pot of geraniums peeking out. The choir sang and it was the best I've heard in many years, and it suddenly hit me quite forcefully, perhaps through the mixture of East and Western tones, the softness and power of the sounds, like wind, that the Holy Spirit was speaking again to me as He did once--here I was in Greece again, but I was not out in a forest but in the house of God--but He knew I would better hear Him again, that my heart was more open somehow, because I was happy--all the pieces were together--family here, my beloved land of formation, my parents, my children, my sister, my husband, the love of friends, old and new, that are part of me now.

The words, like boulders, will not fit what is water and wind--but let me try. Childlike-ness is that particular openness of our whole selves to God speaking, and we hear Him, know him like we are formed as children--through the senses, through a developing, open-to-truth mind, through the emotions so directly attached to the senses for us, through the imagination, through the memory. Therefore, the place we have loved as a child can, once again, open those closed doors that are defenses against what is foreign, what is hard to understand for us, what does not use the same tonal sounds, colors, smells, as that forming place. For me, this land and its people throw open my doors, like the heavy shutters on Greek island doors and windows--that golden light streams in, carrying the brown, grey, blue, white, and dots of red. All of it wakes up my spirit, like profound music in the liturgy--it is a prayer, a conversation that I can't have in the same way, really, anywhere else.

Yet I know God also asks us to be in the dark, to not completely depend on that alma mater or on sensory needs; we have to balance ourselves between detachment and attachment. This is the message of Babette's Feast, in part. Greece is my Feast, to remind me of joy and satiation in landscapes that are foreign to me. Yet I must also practice the asceticism of the North and the winter and the desert. God, knowing my sensual sensitivity, gave me an obvious, forming lesson in Wyoming and I love it for that, too. It reminds me to search always for a renewed heaven and earth, whilst Greece reminds me to dance, to take the joy in, to remember heaven.

Deo Gratias...Δόξα τω Θεώ.

Cheezits from Lander to Athens

The Cheezits made it all the way from their place of origin (I bought them at the Safeway in Lander), down the western side of the Colorado Rockies, on a Delta flight from Denver to La Guardia, and on a NYC Airporter shuttle to JFK; they sat patiently by my side as I negotiated a time/flight change with a harried Turkish Airline clerk (he kept dealing with a broken printer with long-suffering angst while his colleagues sat around talking about shoes, and his boss chatted up the ladies). The Cheezits got a little banged up and lost some of their number as the Safeway bag began to disintegrate before my eyes. They were transferred into another bag for the long flight to Istanbul and offered around. No one wanted them, though--and I wondered, "Why are these all the rage at home but unwanted on the road?" The Cheezits just sat there at my feet as we were feted and wined and dined on the flight--Turkish Airlines is awesome once you've got yourself on the plane. The Cheezits didn't notice a difference from Delta, but I sure did. Delta is an efficient waiting room; Turkish Air is like being at an old European hotel.

The Cheezits might have yelled "Attaturk!" in tiny, yellow voices, as we landed in Istanbul. I wouldn't have been so insulting. They rode along as we all walked through what I told Thaddeus was "New York on steroids": Another, more ancient crossroads of the world, Istanbul at one time was the pearl of the world; as I saw the massive, endless, ancient city from the plane, with the two great bodies of water on either side shining like great mirrors in the morning sun, I thought of the Emperor Justinian and his former-circus-performer wife, Theodora; I thought of the Western Christian knights in their ships outside the city deciding whether or not to attack it. The stones last, and are silent; the people, the players, have disappeared like clouds in the heat of the sun.

The Cheezits and the rest of us were poured into the crowds streaming down the hallways--the juxtaposition of the modern building and the clothing from Africa, the Middle East, Western Europeans, Russians, Indians made me feel like I was at a costume party. Dizzy and sleep-deprived, we went into a place called "The Kitchenette"--a Turkish attempt at cool kitsch. Some song by Queen was playing--but it was at a slow jazz pace, and I tried to eat 'oat flakes with pineapple.' It was just raw oats. The Turkish tea was great, though. No one wanted the Cheetos.

As we got ready to board the plane to Athens, I realized why I'd been so very anxious for hours--sometimes what is at the bottom of our heart does not show itself in our conscious mind but rather in the form of a vague anxiety. I realized I was more excited than I've been for a long time. I live in a Zen mode most times--I've made a truce of sorts with my life; many failures, disappointments, a lot of grace and blessings, but it hasn't been what I expected at all--it has been stranger and much more dangerous in places I'd not expected--the battles I thought I would be fighting, beside Aslan and Peter have turned out to be battles of a different sort: courage in living each day, courage to be kind, to love past knowing, past understanding, to smile and love on, knowing it could all be gone in a second. And Greece was gone, it seemed, in a second, and turning the corner meant a different road, always slightly unexpected.

The Cheezits are much simpler. They don't think. Or feel. I realized I was holding on tight to their bag as I hoped with much more fervor than is rational that the flight would be on time. It was. I asked for the window seat so I could see Greece when we landed; it was cloudy over the Mediterranean, so I accepted that I would probably not get to see--I instead showed Ana the map-- and we flew right over where Xerxes ordered the water to be spanked at the Hellespont, and over Troy--we did much of Odysseus' planned journey in twenty minutes. "I bet that makes him feel kind of stupid," said Ana.

But as we entered Greek airspace, Greece began to show her infinitely varied beauty; the islands and the mountains of the Peloponnese stretched out, black, between the wine-dark sea and the lighter, chiascouro clouds, silent and serene; the sun, as it flowed down, turned red and shot out last glorious color over everything; the lights of Pireaus and Athens sparkled and winked, and we landed. I could see the particular shapes of the mountains around Athens, the shapes of Greece, and I felt at home again; these are the shapes that taught me about about placement and beauty, in an elementary and fundamental way. The contrapuntal feel of the straight, tall cypresses, like spears, and the islands shaped like the delicate outline of a woman's hands at rest; well, they are beauty.

As we entered through customs, the Cheezits had to go--the ones left are lucky. They will feed Greek seagulls at the Greek landfill.

We got on the Metro and the kids started listening to the Greek with their eyes sparkling. Dizzy with exhaustion, we got out at Monastiraki and walked the two blocks to Attalos. On the front desk, they have masticha, a Greek liqueur, available with little shot glasses, as a welcome. My parents found us: "Your family have been asking for you--I will call them and tell them you are here" the front deskman had said, politely; then my sister found us. We went upstairs to the roof bar and I pointed out the Acropolis, lit up at night, still an anchor and focus for the entire city, for my life, in a sense. Thaddeus couldn't quite believe it was really sitting there--"That's real?" he asked, as he stared at it.

As I began to interact with Greeks, I remembered them; I remembered myself. A mix of sweetness and ready humor, they are not uptight or snooty--sometimes impatient, but very real and yet ready for any available joy. It brought me back to what I like, what I knew in my years of forming.

I also felt some sadness, too. Greece is struggling; I just learned that someone we knew, an American who lived in Greece when we did, is head of the IMF for Greece. I am just glad because I know he must, like his father did, like I do, love Greece and will do what he can to help her; also, Greece will further find her identity as a nation (still rather a new nation, though an ancient people--"Greece" was first separate empires and city-states, part of other empires: it became modern Greece in 1830) through the decision whether or not to stay with the Euro. We are waiting to see if a deal is made or if a snap election will be called to see what the Greek people want (July?).

The true Greek identity is somewhere along the 5000 years or so of her history; some say Greeks live almost exclusively in the past--at Anatolia College in the 70s, only ancient history was taught, for example; others, especially the young, are forging an identity through the hardship, and some are dying in despair. But I know something of their identity, I know them. There is a certain feeling of "ah"--a familiarity that is hard to describe even to myself--I know it in the subtle nods between people negotiating traffic, in the simple delight in children, in the pride they take in hard work, always leaving time to rest and create art--art is part of life. So many things.

The highlight of today was watching Thaddeus make Marylynne laugh, and walking on the shiny stones--polished by milennia of human walking, sitting, and laying--of Mars Hill, the Aeropagus, where Paul said, in part, " that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; 28 for in Him we live and move and [b]exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children."

The beauty in that sermon, to me, is Paul's appealing to the Greek sense of beauty by declaring that God had made all this in hope that men would seek Him, to know who had given them life, habitation. 

The swallows were flying low as we walked around. Marylynne said, "Gretchen (childhood friend) used to say that when the swallows are flying low, we'll have rain." We wondered about it together and I was happy, as when I saw Ana, Sophie, and TJ looking around at the city of Athens, excited and grateful for the chance to be here. 

Help! Fire! Police! What About the Riots in Greece?!

I get asked this too often for humor when people find out where we are going.

Riots=Greece. I think my dad might say, "What's a visit to Greece without some rioting?" He finds--what's the word?--sardonic? things to say like that. My sister and I call these slightly inappropriate, but layered-funny statements "Dadisms." Yes, it is meant to look like sadism. Not that he is always a satirical guy. He's just loves incongruity and finds convoluted ways to express it.

I think underneath all that, especially regarding culture (including American culture), is long experience with what I call 'culture clash moments': This when you simply don't get something, you need to, and you just make fun of it to keep your sanity. Also, my parents seem to have ended up in the middle of coups....a shah deposed in Kabul, Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed, a disagreement on a bus in Denmark (that probably made the Copenhagen paper), IX XI in NYC...

My dad, as well-traveled as he is, can't learn languages to save himself from a riot. When we lived in Greece, all he could say was "portokolada" which he thought was "please" (parakalo). He was actually saying to innocent bystanding Greeks, "Orange soda, where is the toilet?" My mom, exceptionally good at languages, smoothed things over; she sure was fluent when driving in traffic in Thessaloniki when I was young. It was part of it; it was almost expected. You were less acceptable if you didn't yell Greek imprecations on the head of a taxi driver, or give the disgusted flick of the head. It is part of the conversation of the polis.

Riots in Greece...I do know that the Greeks let it out when they feel it, and then they move on and enjoy their leisure and their friendships. I know the youth in Greece are, of course, a frustrated lot...they see themselves as paying for the sins of their elders (like the fairy tale of a budget that simultaneously got them into the EU and hot water). What the truth is, or the complexities are, I don't really understand. I just know they have Joseph Pieper's leisure down in some way, but infrastructure? The work-a-day world? Just think opposite of the most Germanic German you can fathom. There you go.

Besides, Athens is in some way a riot everyday--at least from a Germanic/American/British perspective. Traffic laws? Signomi? Thencatalavenete. My childhood and longstanding friend who knows Greece well and is German-Austrian, explained it: "The worst traffic bungles are in countries that pride themselves on following rules. You see, they are expecting others to follow rules--and when someone doesn't? They aren't paying attention. But Athens? You have got to be paying attention every second and driving like you'd drive through a obstacle course with cliffs on either edge, because that's what you're basically doing. Everyone is extremely offensive and defensive...so the serious tangles are fewer."

Just watch a bunch of Americans queuing with a bunch of Greeks. Americans: stiff, offended cats in as straight a line as possible, wanting to punch but keeping it in to fuel the competition for top sales, and Greeks: flies buzzing around meat, having the fight outright.

I think of Euripedes' The Bacchae when I think of Athens and rioting. I think the play is really about an order that drowns out proper outlet of feeling: Dionysus, a 'new' god of feasting and--well, Mardi Gras outletting--is refused a place in the Polis because he is suspect. Law, not passion, says the ruler, only reason and not emotion--that's for the women. The ruler is punished as the god takes revenge by taking the said women out of the city and driving them mad. They rip the ruler to shreds. Thus, in the oneiric world of ancient Greek morals, those who rely too much on law and force to create order, those who banish the passions and the feasting as threats to proper traffic, are themselves ripped to shreds.

Rioting is the Bacchic spirit taking revenge on the city--something has no outlet that needs it--government has been false or oppressive, or the culture itself has become fractured and incoherent. Madness has to be occurring, somewhere. The city is mad--and multiplied laws cannot heal it.

So I grieve for Greece, as I grieve for American cities with rioting. The arts, culture, leisure, education cannot flourish in a polis like this. Better to have Dionysus somewhere within the city--a cult of renewal, proper passion (Christian Dionysus). Not sure a Dionysian government would work well, though it is an intriguing thought. It needs to be a renewal, Christ as Dionysus, a passion for truth, for the Bacchic order of Beauty and Goodness, where human beings are treated and can live as integrated emotional and rational beings with an eternal end, not cogs in large economic power structures, or used plastic bits on the rubbish heap.

I think of Greece at Easter when I think of Christian Dionysus: families would go out of the city, into the woods, and roast a lamb and celebrate the renewal of life, salvation. Baskets and families are blessed by priests cloaked for the ceremony in mystery and royalty, and then the Body of Christ is sent out to joyous reveling. I think of Christian Dionysus when I remember Greek families walking together in the evening, down the road, old mothers and young daughters like gazelles, arm-in-arm, and young men laughing and putting their arms around each other's shoulders like comrades at the end of the fray. Greeks don't have dead space between people.

Greece is much deeper than riots. These are symptoms of an infection, but not a commentary on their art of leisure and life. I intuit (might be wrong) that Greeks see the civil law as servant to the people, not people servant to it...and they don't seem to have the terrible, silent malice of a people focused on global power chess. Silence in the USSR was more frightening to me than Greece screaming at itself--at any time.

Nevertheless, I hope for everyone's sake we don't have that lesson in drama or politics (is there a difference?). Since we're going with my parents, who have a strange track record, we just might.

Nostos

Nostos means 'homecoming' in Greek; in May, I plan to go home to Greece. I just thought I'd chronicle it...it is also a family reunion including my sister, my parents--and a chance for my husband and children to see my home. I really do wonder what they will think.

My husband loves Socrates but is rather inscrutable emotionally: for example, there's an ancient Greek bust of "The Philosopher" that looks like Thaddeus, with his irregular curls and strong, square face, and intense look,  in the National Archeology Museum of Athens; I can't wait to show it to him. The explanation card below it says, "The Philosopher is portrayed with a rough look, unlike the ordered, ideal portrayals of Apollo, etc.. This is because the archetypal philosopher does not care about the things of this world, including his appearance."  Thaddeus won't appreciate it, though. He won't eagerly tred in Socrates' steps, because the Socrates he cares about is the one who speaks in the texts, the one who lives in every other gadfly trying to wake up the Polis from its complacency.

 He might like the water and he'll get sunburnt on the back of his neck. He'll like the bread and (maybe) the ouzo and the coffee. The buzz of Athens will overwhelm him, but he'll like the turtles that live on the grass near Hephastos' temple on the other side of the ancient agora from the Acropolis; he'll probably name one "Clemmy" and want to bring it home.

For my children, on the other hand, Greece is almost a magical place because they know it is a part of their mother; they love it vicariously, as part of their own history, their own sources--that is one beauty of family. We raise to sacredness the small things of our ancestors, and in this, we honor them and ourselves. But I wonder if the reality will take the magic from them, or fulfill it somehow. We take risks when we open memory boxes for those we care most about; but the risk is a necessary part of love, too.

In the last few years, I've got more bold calling Greece 'home'; I'm not Greek by blood, which means in Greece that essentially, you don't belong--though Greece, over the millenia, is as much an immigrant melting pot as anywhere else, from the early Ionians to the present influx of Albanians, Afghans, Somalians, etc..But I lived there only a few years, so why do I care so much?

They were the four years of my life that contained, for me, almost unadulterated happiness--and I suppose part of that is because I wasn't yet an adult. I came to Greece from the high Himalayan plateaus of Kabul, as a five-year-old. I didn't really remember or connect to the native land of my parents; Kabul had been home, but I had set it aside in my heart because when we left, in the summer of 1974, I dreamt over and over that Kabul was lost in a mushroom cloud of fire. Though I didn't know that Kabul would indeed be lost in the fires of war five years later, I knew I would never be able to go back: I left it behind as a jumble of impressions and the love of people I knew there.

Greece, after that, was like an oasis, an Eden. We lived on a beautiful college campus in Thessaloniki complete with old German Nazi outpost cottages from the war with cellar steps receding into darkness and unexploded bombs left cemented over in the forest, the wind through the pines and the view, far off, of the blue sea. I grafted the land and the smell of pines, warm soil, and poppies into myself, into my child's heart. I came to reason, to self-reflection in the forests of Anatolia College, among ancient temples and clear water. I learned courage from rashness through dares to touch the old bomb and to sit on the one chair left in the darkness of the abandoned bomb shelter; I learned the fullness of silence and contemplation in the wind that came to me from the sea; I learned the deep value of a friend at Pinewood School. It was my world, along with the blue, clear waters off Neos Marmaras, a village on the 'second finger' of the peninsulas northeast of Thessaloniki, where we spent our summer vacations. There I learned simple pleasure and freedom in the water, along with the thrill of danger (sitting on the huge, powerful sprinklers at the local golf course, waiting for them to turn on--not too bright--some enema that would have been).

I would hang in the water, like a fish, a fish with fish, a droplet in the blue and golden world where God spoke to me, like He spoke to me in all the other dialects of Greece, the dialects of Beauty. In Greece one never mistakes human ingenuity for creation; it is as if the human beings, after Pericle's flowering of Athens in marble, have ceded the competition quite wisely, in the face of the natural and astounding colors, the graceful curves of the land, the stark exclamations of crag and mountains. The rather haphazard and rat-tat city streets are not desirable; perhaps one might desire only the white-washed, ancient towns on the edge of the sea, or the intricate towns like Metzivan in the forests--yet these humble villages have beauty because they work from, reflect, the nature around them. To me, most Greeks, though, live in relative hovels in the middle of a great and beautiful palace: a palace of sun, water, rock, of gold, blue, and browns. They don't need individual mansions when the communal one is the best in the world.

I left, unwillingly, when I was ten. Somehow, I knew that I was going away from light and into darkness, a dark night, because I reacted then as if I was going to an execution. I was not  wrong in this; it was for me an exile from beauty, from simplicity, from my own heart--but since then, my exile has given me the opportunity to grow, and to be a nomad in this world--which is a necessary lesson for those who love God. I have learned that we must chase our heart all the way to heaven.

My path has been a dark one at times--I am still, at nearly 47, learning to deal with pain of being away from the land that I love like I love my own hand, the only land on this earth I could understand fighting for, dying for, the land that is a part of my soul in some way, my foundation for a' sense of place'--everything from plants to food to building shapes, those things imprinted as 'home' in some way, especially upon the senses. Like a fly catching a glimpse of an eagle (well, it'd see about 100 eagles) I imagine Adam and Eve dealt with this in a massive way after being expelled, and I understand why Socrates did not wish to escape death by leaving Athens, and why, for Dante, exile from his beloved Florence would be worse than death. Is this strong sense of place just reserved for the jewels of this earth? I don't think so, but I think it also has to do with whether or not your childhood was also full of love and happy. Mine was, in Greece. My sense of place is tied up with watching my graceful, handsome father come out of the water with tanks on his back, the water running off him and my mother kissing him in welcome, and that same beautiful, young mother receiving kindly the basil leaves I gathered for her on campus; it is bound up with my sister and me, and Gretchen and Jeff, making up musicals and acting them out.

But a mystery of this life is that we cannot stay still in place, even if we desperately want to; time is a reality of this life, and we are timeless at heart, looking for eternity through a shifting maze of life choices and non-choices; so, God has been slowly taking the roots out, and a nostos, a homecoming, is sometimes--ironically--a way to do just that: take the roots out so that the soul can be ready to be re-planted in its true home. Seeing something again with mature eyes can disillusion us.

Greece, over the years, has also become a memory of pain for me, which should intensify my search for the eternal, unadulterated Good and Beautiful. Things happened which the child I was could not have received, things now known that--even though I am an adult--have nevertheless ripped my soul. I understand more now that the desire for nostos, though very human, and in many ways natural and good, is really a sublimation of True desire, of True Beauty. What is here always fails us and it is not a place of ultimate happiness, or a place where our will can rest.

My father and mother, myself, and my sister, my husband and my children: Between us all there are differences in world view, religious and political and social.  There is also deep love, but it has potential to be an exciting time.

And I hope we get there. We've got to get from one land-locked island, Lander, down to Denver, out to NYC, and then via Turkish Airlines to Istanbul and finally, to Athens.  I'll probably embarrass everyone by weeping uncontrollably when I can see the Three Fingers, the first recognizable sight of Greece from a plane, and down the east coast to the islands, Athens, and the Peloponnese.

I am hoping for some simple things: Coke and bread in the early morning with my sister, the light dancing on the water, dinner in the Plaka, and hearing the fruit seller crying his wares "Come children, delicious fruit" in Monastiraki Square. Beyond that, I hope to offer Greece to the part of my family that has never got a chance to bask in the magical light under which Phidias found form in matter, within which a new revolution of thinking emerged, under which a child found God and reveled in unadulterated joy for a few years in the 1970s before the path turned grey, turned towards the shadows that demand we look for a higher light.

I am not sure I want to know my family's reactions. I'll have to detach a little and hear them. Their Greece is not exactly mine. I must let them have it.