June 24th, Blog #25

What is the source of beauty and joy?

After I recovered my rental car, I was invited to join an Austrian family for dinner at an old Greek mama’s home restaurant. Reagan, Heidi, and his mother, Christine have been coming to Ecoxenia for more than 15 years, sometimes twice in a year and staying 2-3 weeks. They keep in touch by email during the year and each year’s return they share family meals and return to some favored places where they are hugged and welcomed back again. They have been friends since before the now 5 year old daughter was born and remember many milestones of life there.

At dinner, I tried a Pistaccia, somewhat like lasagna and the woman’s famous stuffed tomatoes. Too much oil for me but tasty nonetheless. As so many Europeans do these days, they spoke of the feeling of brokenness of Europe and the euro. This relatively young couple, in their mid-thirties said they would not bring a child into the world, expecting nothing but grim deterioration and a return of dangerous nationalism. They were angry about immigration within the euro zone of Muslims, especially Turks and Africans requesting asylum. They loved the Greeks dearly and mourned for the hardships facing the Greeks for the foreseeable future. The intensity of their secular bias against religiosity, of any kind was chilling and daunting to me.

Santorini is shaped like and elongated “C”, 35 km long, the concave portion is the inner crater rim, and the convex part faces the open sea. The next morning, I rose early and got on the less travelled road south, on the side of the island away from the crater rim to visit Akratiri, the remarkably preserved Minoan city that was buried under 4-5 meters of ash from the huge Santorini eruption. Very much like Pompei and Mt. Vesuvius, many details of daily life were preserved in the town and it’s houses, some large and relatively wealthy, as they were covered with ash relatively suddenly. The site is carefully controlled, indoors. A vast shelter with skylights roofs the town for nearly a square kilometer. Pathways above and amidst the ruins have been paved, amphorae and grinding stones left in place. Most artifacts, however, now reside in museums. I had begun early, so as to visit the site for an hour or two before the tour buses arrived, which worked well.

After departing Akratiri, I bought some delicious figs and apricots from a local fruit stand and walked south to the edge of the southern coast of Santorini, a volcanic place called Red Beach for its deep iron oxide tinted ash beach. Nicely sheltered by a bay, it was a strangely beautiful sand and pumice beach, great for a brief swim in the sweltering noon day sun. Cooled off a bit, I drove back north, this time along the crater rim, stopping every mile or two for magnificent vistas and photographs. I stopped at a bakery and bought a delicious cheese pastry and spinach pastry.

As I drove north, I followed a sign to Boutari vineyards for a wine tasting. I had enjoyed some Boutari wines on Crete and soon learned that they have a number of vineyards and types of grapes in 5 places in Greece. Tasting their varietals was a delight and made the drive a bit more lively as I put on some IPod music and stopped at various roadside attractions :~>;;) Later that afternoon, I found another congenial beach near to my villa apt, to swim and snorkel. After some rest in my room, I drove up to the town of Oia, picked up a few groceries and walked slowly around the pedestrian cliff edge tourist shops. I found another good, less expensive restaurant to watch the sunset dive below the crater rim.

On my 4th day on Santorini, I relaxed and watched the clouds move from my little balcony. The changing angle of the sun interacting with the wind caused subtle continuously shifting patterns of brilliant scintillations on the waves. Something about it was hypnotic, entrancing. I centered myself, practiced mindfulness with chakra awareness for nearly 2 hours. At one point, I felt myself shrink into a tiny point amidst the vastness of the glittering ocean and azure luminous sky. It was as if I and my life was one of those tiny momentary flickering reflections, scintillations on a a wavelet, that shifted, changed, and disappeared, and was replaced by a thousand others. My one instant to reflect the light of the sun, the spiritual nature and physical nature were one and synchronous reflections of one another. It was one of those great moments when the inner and outer world were in harmony and understanding. I lingered in this aliveness until the shade was gone and the intensity of the sun drove me inside. I meditated, journaled, and focused on my breath.

As the sun began to lower after 4:00, I drove to a nearby winery, Sigalos Vineyards, and sampled a series of local white, red, and desert wines, with some delicious bread and olive oil. It was wonderful and a continuation of an intoxicating day. I only wished Pat was there to share it. About 5:30, I drove to another nearby beach and swam, snorkeled, and drifted with the waves, current, and wind, watching the fish along the rocks in the shallow water. I lay on an empty beach lounge chair under a sun shade made of thatch, and watched the children play, dig sand holes as the surf flooded them, and let the waves tumble them again and again, screaming with delight.

That night, after a shower, I drove and parked along the road to Oia. I wandered through the winding paths again, finding a another recommended restaurant for some lamb shank with pilaf, aubergine with tomato sauce as a meze (starter). It was delicious . The sun set over the crater as the slightly less than full moon rose. It was a day filled with gratitude and presence. I packed for my flight to Istanbul that night, thinking of little except right here and now, mindful, a day and evening for savoring of unduplicable beauty.

My meditation practice is guided by a Celtic Christian tradition of the Ceile De, (spouse of God). The prayer, as the meditation comes to a close is in Gaelic, but the translation is “with the ebb and with the flow, as it was, as it is, as it will be, forever, oh thou triune of grace, with the ebb, with the flow.”. This time on Santorini felt full of ebb and flow in both my inner world and the outer world. The fluid ebb and flow, (immense volcanic destruction and breathtaking beauty, and the tides, always the tides) throughout its ancient history until now felt timeless and grace filled.

What do You do with such moments? hours? days? Such beauty? Such feelings of intimate belonging? As a favorite line of mine in the Desiderata says, ” no less than the trees and the grass, you too deserve to be here.”

I have been blessed with many times when I could say, “it doesn’t get any better than this”, only to experience another and another, overflowing amazement and gratitude. I have also experienced ebb tide moments and months of groans and sighs, pain and confusion. The timeless nature of ebb and flow, like the ocean, seemingly forever is the time frame, the “now”. And what is “here” is the Material, personal and world ensouled, and enlivened by invisible Spirit, continually giving birth to a divine emergent creation, always and everywhere. To me, this is the Triune of Grace, the birth from the marriage of heaven and earth, invisible and visible, God father and Earth mother, God and Goddess, Yahweh and Mary. In a dryer way, the philosophers spoke of thesis and antithesis, producing synthesis. In modern days, folks who work toward “reconciliation” struggle with intractable polarization, unbridgeable opposition; they struggle to find “the third way”. (For me, this is much like looking up at the stars and trying to grasp the reality and extent of an expanding universe, or comprehend the details of quantum theory.)

Wonder at the metaphorical child of such opposites arising from divine conjugation! I want to let it happen continuously in my heart and life. I believe such is God’s ongoing creative nature with His/Her two faces, the Unmanifest, invisible presence and the visible, Manifest totality of the One, combining, seed and soil, emergent as the mysterious result of divine union (triune of grace). This paradox of 3 in 1, giving dynamic form to Union, can only be wondered at, not understood with our cognitive brain?

The Music We Are

Did you hear the winter’s over?
The basil and carnations
cannot control their laughter
the nightingale, back from his
wandering

has been made singing master over
all the birds. The trees reach out

their congratulations. The soul
goes dancing through the king’s
doorway.

Anemones blush because they have
seen
the rose naked. Spring, the only fair

judge, walks in the courtroom, and
several December thieves steal away.

Last year’s miracles will soon be
forgotten. New creatures whirl in

from nonexistence, galaxies
scattered
around their feet. Have you met
them?
Do you hear the bud of Jesus
crooning
in the cradle? A single narcissus

flower has been appointed Inspector
of Kingdoms. A feast is set. Listen.

The wind is pouring wine! Love
used to hide inside images. No more!

The orchard hangs out its lanterns.
The dead come stumbling by in
shrouds.

Nothing can stay bound or be
imprisoned.
You say, “End this poem here and

wait for what’s next.” I will. Poems
are rough notations for the music
we are.

Love After Love

Derek Walcott

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome.

And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine, Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
Are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.