Greece....

I am watching the news and the rioting in the streets of Athens. The same streets where just 2 months ago, I was freely walking and enjoying so much.
I am reeling with shock and sadness thinking on the faces of people I got to know, who remain amongst this turbulence now.

I haven't written much of the people whom I met, and who changed my perceptions of the world.
It is so intensely personal and hard to put into words, but so very special and for which I am grateful forever.
My experience was so positive, even amongst being haplessly lost in the Acropolis....even with my taxi getting haplessly lost enroute to the hotel. The air, the life, the people, wonderful.

The people I met taught me so much about what being Greek meant to them. Something I searched deep inwards to understand, being from such a new world.

I came to understand that to be Greek was to be a surviver.
It was the ability to keep a language, an alphabet, an entire history and culture alive amidst foreign occupations, and not being able to speak their own language outloud for hundreds of years.

It was rooted in the family unit grandma to grandchild...generation to generation..... in little abodes around a cooking fire.
It came from the humble stones of home.

I met a woman who sold beautiful leather goods for her family. A family that has sold and made leather goods since the Turkish occupation. She had studied Greek philosophy and was so happy to share her thoughts over wine with me.

We talked into the wee hours of what she called " the Greek condition". Her dark beautiful eyes explaining much more even, than her broken English.
A struggle to survive against oppression, a desire to survive and to be a free people, a struggle that is still entrenched in the young people today; as we are seeing on the streets of Greece everywhere.

This energy that lays just under the surface, has exploded after a police officer shot and killed a young man, even though that officer has been charged with manlaughter by a government who has yet to deal with the riots in its streets and the bullying of a police force that began them.

That energy of survival against oppression and occupation, against injustice and corruption.......it has the energy to move mountains.
It is hundreds of years in the making.
It isn't just young men who are protesting, it is young women, older women....regular people like you and I, who feel the surge of injustice moving them to act.





To touch a piece of Greece is to feel that energy rippling through every molecule.
People have asked me why I need to run my fingers over old stones and ruins....this is why, to absorb some of that energy, to feel, to experience, to take in.....to learn from the past.


I hold Greece close in my thoughts now and forever, a connection to a land so far away and yet so close to my heart.
Such a special place, so unlike anywhere else, so.... well...
...so Greek.