Agrigenta, Sicilia. Tuesday May 1.

Tuesday night, May 1. Agrigento, Sicilia. 

Abductions and Initiations

Dear Trail Friends,

I have fallen behind and realize I cannot do as thorough a job on these posts as I wish I could. 

My sleep has still not adjusted. I woke up early this morning and was very grumpy all day. This despite the fact that yesterday I got a chance to swim in the pool where we stayed last night. I am frustrated because I can’t remember where we went yesterday and what we did today is slipped out of memory too. I need to blog daily but I can’t do everything and I get exhausted being in the bus with others (especially when I am unable to relax and enjoy). I also find the constant input exhausting. Our guide offers lots of information on the bus and my particular hearing difficulties include discomfort with many forms of amplified sound. Her voice over the microphone is a constant irritation and then of course I’m also mad at myself for being ungrateful. What a mess. 

But still - if I can find among the photos moments of beauty and warmth and share them with you - it could make a difference. 

Judy and I have gotten together twice now to do our contemplative drawing at the end of the day. Photos 1 and 2 are drawings we did related to the myth of Arathusa (the nymph who, pursued by the river god Alfeus, sweats in fear and transforms into a stream and who despite flowing underground and under the sea to Ortigia ends up with her fresh water commingled with the sea water of the river god who has flowed into the sea and found her. )

Saturday night Chris lectures on the myth of Demeter and Persephone, the loving mother-daughter pair whose relationship is changed forever when Persephone is abducted by Hades, king of the underworld, and pulled down into the dark underground world of the dead.  

Sunday we went to Enna, a beautiful mountaintop with wild flowers and wide vistas. Although on the Greek mainland the Persephone’s abduction takes place in Eleusis, here on Sicily the story takes place on Enna, and Hades rises not out of the earth when Persephone pulls up a flower, but out of a lake. Somehow Hades rising out of water makes me connect Persephone’s abduction to the story of Alfeus and Arathusa. My friend Cathy C. wrote:

 As I read it, all about the commingling of the fresh and salt water I thought about the Sufi story , the tale of the sands that I always read to my clients.  It is of course the struggle of trying to retain one’s individuality as one comes squarely against the obstacles of life, in this case the desert. The wind whispers, by hurtling in your old accustomed way, you cannot get across, you must allow yourself to be carried in the arms of the wind which will easily and gently carry you over the mountains to the riverside, and drop you was rain, and the rain will become a stream. Yes, we do go back to [meeting] our obstacles in ways we learn[ed] to survive, losing touch with our essential self. Water and wetness whether it is a stream, and ocean, or river, it all remains the same. Her stubbornness and well, our desire to have things our way, resists the ultimate surrender to our essential self. 

This gave me a whole different angle on the story. I tend to see rape as something that shouldn’t happen and resistance to it as natural and necessary - it was interesting to see someone reading it less literally and seeing it as a story about resistance to life. 

One of the daughters on the trip, Alisa, talked to me about her fascination with apes and how different sexual struggle and was in that species. She suggested, if I understood her, that the meanings we give to our physical interactions with all our language and culture create problems that are very different from the direct language of physical encounter. Today as we were being guided on a tour of a Roman villa with extensive mosaic floors and I found myself miserably resistant to standing around listening to the seemingly endless lectures, I became enthralled watching lizards sun themselves on and around the mosaic designs. Tour member Tricia told me she had seen two lizards mating the day before. At first they had seemed to be fighting but as she watched more closely she saw how one was wrapping his sinuous body around the other so their parts could fit together. Of course Tricia said the female lizard was resisting but that seemed to be part of the dance. I pictured that lizard body as similar to the fluid commingling of Alfeus and Arathusa. 

When, I guess I am asking, is it heroic and wise to fight back against attack and injustice? When is it wise and even beautiful to yield the need to get one’s own way and to find one’s fit with life?

Photo 3 is Enna seen from the bus. 

Photo 4 is a collage of views from the top of Enna, including a wild fig tree that I found very striking against the clear blue distance. 

Figure 5 is a collage from my morning walk: looking back at the pool where I swam and the hotel where we stayed (upper left), the full moon in the dawn sky as I started my walk, some roof tiles hand painted with an owl and flowers (lower left). 

I took a lot of pictures of the mosaics at the Roman villa we toured today but honestly my heart was not open to them. I was more touched by the lizard and the story of lizards mating. So I’m going to skip them entirely - except maybe the mosaic of an elephant walking up a plank onto a ship. Of course I knew Roman emperors and nobles imported animals from places like India but I had never imagined the logistics of transporting them. I am struck by this as another form of rape/abduction, this one perpetrated by humans “against” animals and the natural world. And yet I am aware of how complicated and nuanced all this is for me at the moment. More a mystery to contemplate than a crime to condemn. Photo 6 is the elephants getting on the boat. 

After the villa we visited a vineyard and though I was fiercely resistant to the organized tour, the delicious and generous lunch (antipastos in photo 7), the great pasta di Norma, the generous tasting of five wines and the homemade cannoli  - best any of us had ever eaten, the ricotta made this morning from fresh milk totally turned my mood around. 

I was in love all over again with our group especially the beautiful mother -daughter pair (Raquel and Marinka) sitting across from me. Here’s a collage of the group in photo 8, lunch tables in upper left and write, Marinka and Raquel in lower left, Chris with our tour guide Angela in lower right. 

I wish I had the time and energy to write about Chris’s lecture tonight about Asclepius and healing. We will visit the temples of Agrigento tomorrow. The temple to Arsclepius is one of many and a small one, but Chris chose to focus this myth today. I will content myself with the one image that stayed with me. Many of the people who came to seek healing were women who could not conceive or who had a series of miscarriages. Often they reported dreams (most commonly a dream of a snake entering their vagina - the snake was associated with the healer god Aesclepius and seen as an embodiment of the god) followed by healthy pregnancies and births. 

I couldn’t of course help associating the snake ( it may be a symbol of the healing god, but it is also associated with fear and death and the underworld) with the mating lizards, the rape of Arathusa by Alfeus, the abduction of Persephone. Group member Renee spoke to me about how motherhood was an initiation into death in so many ways: the death of the pre-motherhood self, the awareness of fear of death because of the fear (though it occurs to me as I write that  Freud might say also the wish) of not surviving to care for one’s children. 

All this is moving inside me, in my mind and in my body as well, in a way that reminds me of the waves we could hear outside our window when we were in Ortigia. If I think of this journey as a pilgrimage, then I can embrace my discomfort and resistance as part of the pilgrimage, as essential and important as the times of beauty and loving connection - though of course I much prefer those. 

Enough. Way past time to go to bed. But thank you thank you thank you for walking with me, riding the bus with me, wrestling with waves, lizards, snakes, river gods, gods of the underworld. Grazie mille.