This morning, I again heard from Angela, wondering where exactly should she go on the island of Crete? I had been planning on sending her my essay reflecting my travels there, but then never got around to it. This morning I did, finally, send that essay.

THE RUINS OF TIME

Ye gods! Or, I should say, Ye Goddesses!

On re-reading it myself, I was stunned to realize that I had been traveling there in November 1990, during a previous terror-stricken time,  when the seemingly eternal mideast boil was about to erupt — again.

And yet . . .

Excerpt:

Time here is present as a continuum, forming a temporal spectrum as vast as the ocean that surrounds this fabled island. And yet, there is a heaviness to this experience of time, a gravity, almost a sense of oppression. The longer I remain in Greece, the more I feel in my bones how the past spreads its arms to receive, to condense, to crush, to stratify, to obliterate. Our mortality is an inescapable and haunting fact.

This fact is contrasted by another, opposite fact, one which astonishes me. For the heaviness of time’s duration is shot through with light. The light of human awareness shines through the gloom, leaving traces of itself along the way. These are the distillations of time, of memory, of culture — through the architects’ organization of space, the artists’ working of function and material into form; they bear silent testimony to that endless creative capacity which both expresses our humanity and lives on.

 

Yes, I was there with a friend in November 1990. The essay begins with my frantic search for an English paper in Athens, in order to read “the news.”

What strikes me now, however, is how I no longer relate to “the news” in the same manner.

Basically, I have absolutely no idea what is really going on. Or why. Or, the ever-enlarging contextual situation that dictates it, at least from some points of view. Though I sense the situation is terrible, I also realize that, for example, if a wild animal was about to attack me, or my kin, all my instincts aroused, I would fight back.

Although for many years, especially in my 40s, I saw myself as a “peace activist,” violently imposing my own dogmatic point of view about the coming apocalypse unless we can somehow reverse the nuclear arms race — those days are long past. Recognizing my own violence helped me to lay down my own arms and work coming into peace within myself.

At 83, after decades of tumultuous “work on myself,” I dwell within 5D presence, a spaciousness inside myself that allows for the pulsing presence of polarities without being pulled to identify with one side or another.

And yet. And yet.  As I said, IF a wild animal was about to attack me, or even, IF that animal was present, not far off, and I KNEW it would attack me and my kin sooner or later, I might be very tempted to figure out a way to neutralize this threat.

IS this what’s going on? I have absolutely no idea.

Jordan Sather echoes my attitude.