Taormina, Sicilia. May 9.

Taormina, Sicily. Wednesday, May 9. 

Oedipus at Colonus

Dear Trail Friends,

Tonight Chris gave her final lecture for the tour. Tomorrow May 10  we will have our final dinner. Friday May 11 we will ride the bus back to Siracusa and watch a Greek tragedy - Oedipus at Colonus - performed in the Ancient Greek amphitheater. May 12 we will disperse,  with some of us heading home and others going on separate adventures. 

It feels as if this experience has barely begun, I am only beginning to discover how to live it, and now it is about to be over. I find myself feeling a lot of sadness. It’s as if all my losses - the losses that have happened in the past, the losses I anticipate in the future - are are mixed up emotionally with the ending of this tour. 

Chris’s lecture seemed to me even more multi-layered than usual and I know it will be impossible for me to communicate my experience of it (much less the lecture itself). I was very emotional as the lecture began. One group member had shared her intense disappointment in the hotel we are staying in here in Taormina. I felt somehow responsible or perhaps identified with Chris and the organizers and the challenges they faced and hard choices they had to make. I also felt ashamed that Chris and I got the best room (with a sea view) while others had views of power lines and motor scooters. But mostly I felt strong emotions I could not name or understand - a real surge of emotions that left me off balance. I had sat in the very front row in all the previous lectures. This time I sought out the very back row. I felt as if I was hiding and also trying to protect myself and others from all the strong feelings I didn’t understand. 

As Chris talked I slowly began to project my emotions into the stories she told. She said that Sophocles was 90 when he wrote the play Oedipuscat Colonus, and that it was not performed until after he died. She said that, not only was Oedipus old in the play but, in the one performance of the play she had previously seen, the actor who played him was old, and died a few years later of AIDS. She spoke of the defeat of Athens by Sparta and a time of transition and perhaps the death of a dream. She spoke of how all Greek tragedies and this one in particular deal with the tension between obligations to family and obligations to political life and the larger community. She spoke about the Eleusinuan mysteries and how people sometimes were able to overcome the fear of death through that ritual and that this play also might suggest that it is possible to overcome fear of death (perhaps without the ritual since Athenians had lost access to Eleusis in the war, and could no longer make the ritual walk from Eleusis to Athens). All this was swirling in my thoughts and slowly my shame-fear-guilt-anger seemed to coalesce into sadness. I thought of the trip ending. I thought of Chris retiring sometime in the next 3 years, and of her being almost 90 (like Sophocles, like the actor who played Oedipus). I thought of Freud’s essay on transience. And I thought of my own wish for the tour and it’s planning to be flawless, for Chris’s competence and confidence to be flawless - and how hard it is for me to accept scarcity either in time or in any other dimension of life. I love that Freud wrote that scarcity makes things precious. I have enjoyed during my 30+ years with Chris moments in which I experienced an illusion of safety. Feeling safe enough to relax, to open my heart, to love, to cultivate wonder and curiosity. Are those moments scarce? Are the brief? (And where did I ever get the expectation that life could or should be otherwise?)

I was most moved when Chris spoke of the Eleusynian mysteries and suggested that Persephone may have talked with her mother about what the underworld was like, that Demeter herself was the first initiate into the Eleusynian mysteries. She imagined Persephone telling her mother that it was a different world, but it wasn’t that scary. I couldn’t help thinking of my niece Angel coming back to visit with my sister Judy and giving her the same message. 

I didn’t get any real walking in today but we did wander the streets and shops and visit the old Greek/Roman theater which is beautiful. We returned to the arched doorway where we took photos ten years ago. Photo 1 is the photo then and photo 2 is a photo now. 

I like experiencing our own transience in relation to the transience of civilizations and all that they create. 

Photo 3 shows some of our group listening to the local tour guide (as usual I opted out of the formal tour). I hope it (along with photo 4) conveys some of the beauty of these remains, or ruins, or whatever is the right word to describe them. 

I am disappointed that I can’t write in a way that shares adequately the depth of the lecture of the simple beauty of the day. But in a way the theme today is limitation and imperfection so it makes sense that I would experience it as I blog, too. 

On the other hand, I cannot begin to thank you for the overwhelmingly generous response to my writing about my longing for an email that said “I love your blog.”  Not only do you join me on my hikes and now this Sicily pilgrimage - allowing me to have the closeness I long for with the distance I need - but you respond with such sensitivity and spontaneity and creativity when I admit how much I want to feel that this blog is loved. I was totally blown away by the love I received.  I still am. 

I am thinking of the days when I was a teenage convert to the Catholic Church and how I loved the rituals, all of them. Right now I am thinking of the fist to the chest and “Domine non sum dignum...” Lord I am not worthy that you should come into my presence but say merely the word and my soul shall be healed. I think “the word” is love. 

Ed - who was a Catholic priest who served as a hospital chaplain - told me that the communion instruction “take and eat this for this is my body” really means “love others as I have loved you” which makes me think that the taking in of the bread is symbolically taking in love. Maybe that’s why that ritual moved me so deeply. 

Maybe that’s what’s so moving to me about this blog. Human love - it is transient and it is limited and flawed. Hard for me at least to feel safe enough to receive it and pass it on. But that is the best part of life. Better even than wonderful food. Well. Maybe not better than. But as good as. 

Let’s end with Judy, Chris and me eating gelato in photo 5. I tried hazelnut for the first time (I usually get coffee). I am in imagination ordering you a gelato cone that you also can eat as we stroll down the streets of Taormina. Thank you for sharing the sweetness with me.