This photo was taken last fall in Chania, Crete after I hiked the Samaria Gorge (twice! because my GPS tracker on my phone switched off mid trail the first time) and also Agia Irini Gorge. Stay tuned in for a new min guidebook soon on these two hikes!
While contemplating the unique beauty of Ikaria Island, I’ve uploaded some photos for sale at Alamy. My page is here:
Samples of Photos on Alamy for Ikaria Island.
For reasons that we may not ever fully comprehend, waterfalls are mesmerizing.
I think this taps into something deep within our human nature of inherited, unspoken instincts.
This blog is about field notes ‘in situ’.
In situ: in the natural or original position or place. In archaeology it refers to an artifact that has not been moved from its original place or disposition.
For a refugee, what can in situ mean? I was thinking about this when I bought a painting created by a refugee in Greece to support their livelihood. The painter is Sama. She crossed the sea from Turkey with her family.
The painting at first glance looks simple. But it isn’t simple. Look closer and the lines actually reach from one side of the sea to the other side and find each other in a new land. The view to Greece/EU from Turkey is just like this. Hoping for freedom…like migrating birds. But birds all over the world are free to migrate. Which is the more evolved species? How should we think about ‘freedom’? Why is something so simple so tragically complex?
And what can in situ for a refugee possibly mean?
We are given some tools - but not all- to figure out who we really are. We think in a language in our head (a secret language since it isn’t fully shared with anyone else) and believe this language reflects also the emotional and psychological realms of our being.
But does it? How do we know?
We are not given the raw layer of coding that composed us. We ourselves will forever be a mystery to ourselves. And i think this is why the human mind salivates over mysteries.
Each breathing moment there is the unconscious awareness that the crucial burning mystery, which we experience at every moment of our lives, will never fully be solved.
But we try. We think we even get closer sometimes.
We use our intellect and our physical strength and our relationships and our meditative mind to try to solve who we truly are.
Yet, we never will.
Every other mystery we try to solve is a spin off from this:
The mystery of our own cold and frightening abyss.
[photo: mist rising off the coast of Maine]
Unexpected location to stumble across this Grecian style amphitheater….. Dominican Republic
The colossal walls of Troy (layer VI)
The site of Troy is a maze. Towering outer walls suck us in. We are quickly disoriented. Which way forward? Which layer of history are we walking through? Hittite? Homeric? Hellenic? Classical? Roman? The tight walls lead us around a stone time warp that no one has figured out how to unravel. Where in all this mess hides the spirit of the mythical Trojan War?
We look and we try to piece it all together. Can we do a better job than the archaeologists that muddled things up?
Time is a vertical loop. The stones walls press down, deeper into the battered earth. The winds sweep across the plains and the grasses grow over.
Heinrich Schliemann is blamed for making this mess. But he both destroyed and created Troy. His dogged dream has made the rest of us follow, coming here with our own dreams and imaginations.
Many say that visiting the site of Troy isn’t worth it. Civilizations mashed into one clumpy batter.
Fortification walls torn to shreds
No temples or statues to dazzle
Utterly disappointing and … boring
But the cynics are wrong!
There’s no better tell than Troy to see
The madness of the archaeologist
Constructing a new ‘truth’ from destructed layers
Followed by another man’s obsession…and another…and....who really holds the prize?
Who, if anyone, has ‘discovered’ Troy?
Digging
Digging
Digging
Digging
Incessant heat. Tedious labor. Slashing winds.
The writhing and hissing of poisonous snakes
copulating in pits of past civilizations.
Interpreting each fragment. Each location.
Labeling. Precisely. Wrong!
Digging
Digging
Digging
Singed and abandoned layers
Bearing no words or deciphering key
Lodged deep … those seductive jewels and double axes …
in the voiceless layers of our own human psyche.
From the book, Homeric Vocabularies, Owen and Goodspeed, 1969.
Read from top to bottom, and notice how the least expected word on the list, Hand, establishes the mood and the action in this ‘found poem’.
What is missing?
His eyes. They've been stolen. A cruel jagged mask severed the reciprocal view from the viewer.
So we gaze at his beauty through a cloak of invisibility. Never do we need to feel ashamed or subjected to the judgment of his return gaze. His youthful lips and ripened cheeks are objects of our adoration. But we cannot connect to him. The association with a real figure is partially lost.
Yet, the fragmentation provokes a new way of looking at him. It is one-side, selfish and fitting for these impersonal times.
We can judge him. But he can no longer judge us.
Fragmentary Colossal Head of a Youth. Greek, Hellenistic Period, 2nd Cent. B.C. Discovered at Pergamon. (Photo taken at the Metropolitan Museum, New York)
The spider is a weaver. A master weave. And the spider is often portrayed as a female femme fatal. The black widow, being a most famous one.
A weaver is full of symbolism. A female weaver of Homer's mythical epic is Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. Every night she wove a burial shroud for her father in law, promising to choose a suitor once it was finished. But then, every morning she unraveled her weaving.
The sculpture artist Louis Bourgeois brought the spider new recognition and a firm place in the art world. Her spiders sell for millions. At the DIA Art Foundation, the description of the Crouching Spider elevates the spider to something pretentiously existential, focusing in part on the qualities that the spider inherently possesses as a weaver. "This dichotomy of protection and threat expresses Bourgeois's ambivalent idea of maternity."
Crouching Spider (2003) Loius Bourgeois. DIA Art Foundation. Photograph taken Jan 2017
I look out to the islands of Fourni. I notice that some days or hours of the days the islands are present and close, their rough contours plain to see. The dry ruggedness of the land, mostly Inhabitation, harsh, severe, dirt. Other times the islands are softened but still visible in a clear light; jetting facades look like giant chocolate chips, playful in their brown spectacled mountain landscapes. This morning the islands float two, not three, dimensional, behind a haze like soft fluffy clouds floating on the sea.
I look with the same eyes to the island mountains. But with the different lenses that nature gives me to show me that nothing is just ever one and the same. Heraclitus said thousands of years ago that everything changes and nothing stands still.
We are given not just lenses from nature, but internal lenses of perception. We examine others from changing conditions within us - often emotional ones. Fear. Anger. Desire. Jealousy. I try to be aware of those lenses and funnel them instead into one of my favorites: curiosity. When we cast a light of curiosity to another person - this can be a very generous and positive lens.
We can look at an old person slowly walking along a beach with a limp and see not decay and past life, but mysteries of great stories hidden inside a precious seashell. What storms or struggles did she have to survive to get to this shore? How was a child transformed into this man now? What can I learn from her trembling fingers? How can I give something to make that person feel even more alive today?
And do I want him or her to remain like a dreamy haze to me walking along the horizon - or reach out with a playful splash of a hello. Or, am I going to keep an anonymous distance and look with rugged and severe eyes toward a limping man?
The same goes the other way. How do others view us? We are not even the same person to each and every single person we meet...or that we exchange a sideward glance with. Can we do anything to filter or clarify all the altering lights falling upon ourselves? What do we inadvertently absorb? What do we consciously reflect?
View of Fourni Island from Ikaria, Greece
Look
on the rock
an ancient shard
lip of a water jug
incised with a wave
carved by a woman
over two thousand
years of waves
ago
scanning
the Aegean Sea
pining for
her son
who
never came
home.
Dedicated to refugees who are right now crossing a sea of waves, from Turkey to Greece.
Picture location: Assos , Turkey (Photo by: Charlene Caprio)
