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.