Today the trees spoke to me
Nature - Wing open, wing closed and in between breath.
Corfu – July 2019
The old eucalyptus tree calls me out, he invites me to sit down and rest.
This is his wound and his true face…
He introduces me to his sister guardian tree watching everyone who enters the park.
Isn’t she beautiful ?
While he offers rest to my back, the cicadas enter my head with their incessant songs.
Finally – trancelike – I feel the silence within and merge with my new friends of the moment…
I touch the soft needles of the eucalyptus, adorning the base of the stem like a carpet.
I dream of old times when Goddess Hera was once worshipped here at Monrepos.
The olive trees a little further up, charm my sight, I imagine them knowing the history, their roots connected to the olive trees who lived long before Christ…
Diving deep into memories, in personal and universal bodies…
Held in the oh so generous embrace of the Corfu goddess, I dare to feel again and let go…and fill myself with Beauty.
To keep open some windows of sacredness, of softness, of naturalness, of feminine touch and togetherness- through the pain of this world right now, feels so important.
Remembering the eternal, the flow- looking through our big children eyes, in gratitude.
Shall we remember the one and precious Life?
The universe is not in favor or against us, and there is no reason to ask for mercy. Forgiving oneself and others seemed to be a key to not carry the luggage with us. When one cannot go on with ones paradoxes, it is time to choose the healing way, carrying the impossibilities with joy and nobility, staying in the spaces ‘in between’.
When the end of illusions present themselves we feel lighter if we care to see.
What is left at the end of the day?
A few days earlier, accompanying my old mother to the graveyard of her grandparents, I wonder: who will remember me, us?
I hear: ‘Nothing is lost, the faint breath of love exchanged in the subtle air, received at the other end of the universe. Nothing is lost.’
A few days later, I wake up with the picture of this beautiful seagull with a hurt right wing whom I met on the beach 2 days earlier. Finding a way of action, at 10pm in the night, with the moon almost full, and the eclipse lurking, I find her and offer her sardines.
She hops around nervously trying to spread this wing hanging down. I leave the sardines close to her… I call out loud to the goddess, invoking her help. I scream, swear… My love for nature is painful by moments, my feeling of being powerless in font of what is happening all around… My right arm, shoulder, wrist hurts…
Next day I come back in the afternoon, it is a rainy day and no one is around on the beach… she is not alone, there seem to be a friend seagull encouraging her. She accepts my offering picking the sardine up every time I throw one…
I go to the sacred cave, make an offering to mother Corfu Nature, in balance…
My eyes are in tears- how simple.
I’m leaving next day. My friend, who stayed one week longer tells me almost daily the progress of her wing, and then she flies…
Wing open, wing closed and in between breath.
The sanctuary of Hera at Mon Repos is considered a major temple, and one of the earliest examples of archaic Greek architecture.
Hera_ is the goddess of women, marriage, family, and childbirth in ancient Greek religion.
The relation between the Greek society and the olive tree was very intense. The demonstrationss of how special this tree was for the Greek society were abundant. It symbolised strength, victory, fertility, resistence and it was a sacred element when offered to Gods.
This is the myth of the cicada-man Tithonus who, as a handsome young man, became the lover of the goddess of the Dawn. She, in gratitude for his love, granted him the gift of immortality. As in all such stories this divine gift was not an unqualified blessing as his immortality was accompanied by the inexorable advance of old age. Poor Tithonus kept getting older and older, smaller and smaller, until there was nothing left of him but his shrill voice, or until he turned into a cicada
