Agrigenta, Sicilia. Wednesday May 2.

Agrigenta, Sicilia. Wednesday May 2. 

Broken Wings

Dear Trail Friends

I have just returned from a dinner with the tour group. I am amazed with the bonds that are developing so deeply and quickly among group members. I could feel the warmth and vitality of connections - the laughter, the crackling and sparking of electric energy - filling the whole room. 

Photo 1 shows the group at our dinner. 

Dinner, just in case any of you love food as much as I do, began with an antipasto plate (eggplant caponata with swordfish, octopus salad with potatoes, sardine rolls stuffed with something exotic and served with marmalade and orange and lemon slices). There followed a creamy ricotta with shrimp and zucchini and sprinkled with finely chopped pistachios, and we finished with a pannecotta in a berry sauce (uncertain what the berries were, they were small and round and purple and tart as well as sweet). 

It’s really fun getting to know Ben and Kiki from Orcas Island ( they sat across from us at dinner - photo 2). 

I loved hearing that Ben and Peter (Chris’s son) had found a music store and played guitars together this afternoon. Another group - looked like 8 or so - discovered the Pirandello theater and were given an impromptu tour that included a chance to play around on stage and take a group bow. 

As we headed for our room  tonight Marenka wished us healing dreams, and I thought of how sharing Chris’s trance-inducing myth lectures, plus visiting all these sites and sharing all the good food and wine - all this creates a shared frame for references and associations that make our interactions very rich. I am hoping that in some small way this blog allows you to share in that. 

Since you are riding on the bus with us, I thought you should have a glimpse of the inside of the bus. As I snapped the photo Marenka was hugging the person beside her on the bus. I thought it would be her mother Raquel but it turned out to be Tricia. I see the group of us hugging one another a lot, and dipping into deep conversations that allow us to share our joys and passions as well as our sorrows -  to share our stories. 

Photo 2 is inside the bus. 

This morning we went to the valley of the temples here in Agrigento, the biggest collection of temples from the ancient world at one site and the most well preserved. We had negotiated with the organizers so those who wanted to could follow the guide and others could wander freely and simply meet at a fixed place and time to ride back on the bus. Judy, Chris and I decided to walk back (just one mile) so we’d be totally free to move at our own pace. Though rain and thunderstorms were predicted, the sunny weather held up for our whole adventure. 

I was struck by the joy of returning to this beautiful site that the three of us visited ten years ago when we first “scouted” Sicily fit a possible tour. We visited in fall then and the blossoming wildflowers added to the beauty. The golden limestone used for the temples gives a warmer feeling than the marble used in mainland Greece. The view of the Mediterranean from the temple sites is gorgeous. 

So..,photo 4 is a collage of views of the temples and the sea. Be sure to notice the goats in the upper right. I fell totally in love with their corkscrew or spiral horns (which associated for me to the sinuous movements of mating lizards, to snakes and their role in healing dreams, to the intermingling of Alfeus and Arathusa in their watery bodies) and was fascinated to know they were a special breed of Sicilian goat (Girgentana goats) who have been an endangered species probably because though adapted to the rough terrain and climate and able to bear extreme aridity and produce good flavored milk and cheese they are not the kind of high producers who adapt well to a world of factory farm animal raising practices. 

Photo 5 is a collage of views of a sculpture called Icarus by a Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj. I was deeply moved by the broken wing, the classically sculpted body broken in the way classical sculptures often are. There was a sense of the brokenness brought about by time and age (both to art and to bodies) being connected with the myth of Icarus flying recklessly close to the sun so that the wax that held his wings intact began to melt. Chris had just retold this myth in a lecture speaking of Daedalus, Icarus’ father, as in a sense the first Greek to arrive in Sicily when he escaped from Crete where he had been a slave (and constructed the famous labyrinth) - the same flight during which his son Icarus died. The sculpture was as far as I could tell unsigned. I was lucky that I overheard a woman nearby was explaining that the face (set in the square indentation in the back of the Icarus figure) was how the artist signed all his work and so I asked her the artist’s name. I couldn’t find anything on google about the head being used instead of a signature - so I’m skeptical. But still fascinated by the box and the face. 

Photo 6 is a collage trying to give you a sense of how the spring flowers added color and beauty to the valley of the temples. 

Ahhhh. What a lovely day this has been. I hope my photos and words allow you to share some of the pleasure I found in this place and this day. 

There was lots more. We returned to the gardens that we visited ten years ago that I had found to be a little bit of paradise. I loved the groves of orange trees and the olive trees hundreds of years old and the ancient system of irrigation. I loved that they had quotes from both Camereri (author of the Montalbano mystery series that Chris and I so thoroughly enjoyed reading and watching on TV in preparation for this journey) and Pirandello. But the fact was - as is so often the case with memories of paradise - that I couldn’t recover the experience I thought I remembered. 

I think of Chris’s lecture on Demeter and Persephone when she gave us the “backstory” of the birth of the Titans and the successive rebellions of Cronus and Zeus against their fathers. She spoke of Gaia, the original mother in this story, who always seemed to be in the side of change. When gods tried to imprison or swallow their children, she supported the new generation and their freedom even though it might involve harm or loss for the older generation. 

Of course this tour for me, in its pilgrimage aspect, is about my ongoing struggle to learn to accept and love change. To learn to relinquish my expectation that life should be the way I want or expect it to be. That I should get my way. That paradise when I return to it should be paradise again. Paradise on demand. 

I need to stop and go to sleep. I am grateful for a day of so much beauty and pleasure and sharing it with you amplifies that pleasure immensely. Please forgive me if I don’t respond to your emails. I love love love getting them and respond in my mind but don’t always find time to do so on my iPhone. So you may have to imagine my side of our conversation sometimes. Thank you for walking, riding, being with me on this journey.