For the first time, in a long time, we had a home to return to.
Jesse and I took a month off work this summer to go to Greece. The invitation came from our friend and mentor, Bhavani Maki. “It’s the Mexico of Europe,” she said laughing as she leaned into the back seat smiling at us as we drove toward her family home near Isthmia. What a warm welcome and a fine face to be staring at as I come down from travel anxiety and acclimate to Eastern European Summer Time.
Most of the big moments in my life have transpired because I said, “Yes” to the simple invitations that have come my way.
“Yes,” I’ll sell my car and buy an airplane ticket to Brazil.
“Yes,” I’ll go to India for three months.
“Yes,” I’ll marry you.
Small, seemingly insignificant moments, made manifest by just saying “Yes” to an equally simple invitation. Who knows what will happen with a sincere invitation and a simple, “Yes.”
“Yes,” we’ll come to Greece.
Being on Kriti (as the locals call it) for three weeks felt like fairy time—it could have been a month, it could have been three days… As the night ferry picked up speed, rounding the concrete wall of the port and headed out into the open sea, Jesse and I stood as close to the bow of the boat as we could. The wind blowing hard against our bodies. I tucked myself under Jesse’s arm and we laughed with giddiness feeling the wind in our faces and the swell of a giant body of water under the ferry. Neither of us had ever been on a boat this big. We watched the sun set over the port leaving streaks of pink in the blue sky. I cried and laughed and we finally headed inside to sleep in our bunk beds until the ferry landed in Piraeus the next morning. Transitions bring up a lot of emotion for me and goodbyes are especially tearful. Jesse and I both fell in love with Greece and her people and the food!
I recall now, my purpose for traveling is to let the experiences land in my being and become a part of who I am. So much so that who I am is permanently altered. Sometimes it’s challenging to come to land in my own skin. Re-turning home has always been more challenging for me than leaving. Because often the people I left don’t quite know how to hold this next phase of who I am. I don’t know how to hold this new version of me that is now home-coming.
The re-turn is about integrating whatever the trip has stirred up in me, for me.
Re-entry is as much an initiation as the traveling.
Traveling has always been an essential part of my life and my education. I got my first passport when I was six months old. We went to Germany in 1988. My dad was in a rock band and the Berlin wall had not yet come down. Berlin is where I learned to crawl. I’ve been making pilgrimages to far away places ever since.
I use the word, pilgrimage, because I learned to travel as a way of learning both about the people and the place I was visiting but also about myself. Pilgrimage because I learned to travel not as a spectator but as a participant. Travel is not something separate from my “real life,” it’s an homage to the realest life I could possibly imagine.
Some mornings, when I look at the blue glass, matiasma, eye that I picked up in small shop in Myrtos, a beach town on the south side of Kreta, Greece, my latest point of pilgrimage, I get tears in my eyes. “I miss Greece,” I say to my husband. What I really mean is, “I miss who I was in Greece, I miss how I felt while I was in Greece.” This is what traveling does for me, reminds me of a new part of myself I found while “vacating” my normal routine. This “re-membered” I am now trying to integrate with my every day life.
As a young person, righteously driven by exuberant passion and deep desire to grow myself, fueled by fire and inhibition, I found myself flung far around the world meeting strangers in airports and dancing on table tops in bars and in cages at night clubs. As a late teen and early 20-something, home was a nuisance to shake free. Home was where my parents lived. At that age, coming home was a let down because I was transforming so rapidly and by virtue of age or place or both, “home” stayed the same. Also, what a relief. Nothing had changed at home while I’d been around the world, not to “find myself” but to find out about the world.
Then ten years passed of leaving and returning home. Of learning to stand on my own, making a home of my own. Home became a place I craved and admired of others. I wanted a home full of my belongings and memories. I wanted to learn to love living in my own skin.
I’m told Odysseus took nine years to return home, nostos, after the Trojan War. That whole time he never traveled further than the Mediterranean sea. Although I have not been to war like Odysseus, I feel that my nostos, the great return, is about landing and integrating. I am finding my way through this now.
There’s no telling what life has in store for me (or you) yet I am taking my cues from Stephen Jenkinson and Martín Pretchel and apprenticing myself to this place where I am right now—the high desert of Northern Arizona. My ancestors are not from here, and yet I do my best to honor this land and it’s people not by trying to be them, but instead learn my way among them—the rocks, plants, animals and people that constitute this part of the world.
At home, the desert is like the ocean, I can see for a hundred miles and the night sky is like an aquatic body of full of stars.
M O R E (and more) L E S S O N S F R O M G R E E C E:
I learned that the sea is different than the ocean. How? Can’t you feel it? I learned I’m slightly afraid of heights. I learned that Greek drivers like to follow really, really close. I learned the term, “Sigá-sigá (σιγά-σιγά )” which means “Slowly, slowly,” in Greek. This applies to everything in my life. I learned that I shut my eyes when I feel something scary might happen. I learned that the Greeks refer to a swim in the sea as a “bath.” I learned that I nod my head up and down a lot and smile way too much when trying to communicate in a language I don’t speak. The Greeks do not smile as a form of greeting. I learned that most of the Greek olives are sold to Italy, cut with soybean oil, and then sold to Americans as “Italian Olive Oil.” Wha-?! I learned that pure olives oil tastes like sunshine. I learned that, in Ano Viannos, the old widowed women still wear black for the rest of their lives. Head scarves et al. I learned that fear and anxiety are very close under the surface for me. I learned that relaxing can be delightful and necessary and taking naps doesn’t mean I’m “lazy.” I learned that the stories I tell myself in my head are mostly made up (and false) until I verify their validity, in daylight hours. I learned to importance of yatra—traveling great distances to visit with loved ones—is the stuff of life. I learned that I still over pack even after 34 years of travel. I learned that, when traveling with someone, it’s best to pay a little more and get a sleeper car so that in the morning you both still want to stay married.
I learned I love fresh sardines. I learned to cook a whole fish, with brains and eyeballs. I learned that Greek salad is a thing. A delicious thing. I learned, yet again, that I have to do the work of integrating every experience I have in life so that whole, I can offer myself into the world, whole.
I learned that home is where the Heart can drop.
Y O G A
>> Join the Yoga Sūtra Study Group where we sit in good company, learn to chant the Yoga Sūtra of Patanjali and unpack the sūtra whether you are already an expert or yet uninitiated. This class if for those interested in what Yoga is on a deeper level, and not just the physical postures. Sundays 11:45-1:15pm, Prescott, AZ.
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>> The Yogi’s Roadmap Podcast. “What a gift this podcast is! Insightful, heartfelt, inspiring and thought provoking. A must listen for the seekers, & mystics walking the path!” -S.T.K.
Just beautiful Shinay. Love traveling with you through your writing. I hope you will title your eventual memoirs “Berlin is where I learned to crawl.”