Tourism ends

There comes a time when you are no longer a tourist. Hauled and herded from ruin to church to mosque. Pointing your camera at the same scene as hundreds of others. Listening to the same lecture delivered a hundred times in a hundred languages. Watching the same demonstrations. Smelling the same sweet scents. Always amazed and amused by the friendly and accepting faces of the local people who live carefree in such a beautiful place. There comes a time when the traveler arrives. A traveler is different. They wander alone or in very tight company. The hypocrisy of religious iconography dismays, annoys and angers them. So much time, energy and money used and still people starve and need and want. “What divine being elicited this?” the traveler asks. The postcard view has no value. His, hers, theirs are all alike. It is looking without seeing. It is fixed and photoshopped and devoid of life. A vision narrowed and closed, a self-imposed glaucoma. The traveler needs to broaden their view to see behind the curtain, under the table and behind the walls. Pushing to the edge and taking in the scene. The viewers and themselves an all encompassing whole that does not distort, until there is no edge. Mars, blemishes, age, grime, rust, dirt and scratches are the guts which make the beauty shine brighter. A traveler knows this and will not accept a polished view. Stories for children. Fairytales for adults. The 90 minute lecture. This because a tourist is on the clock and cannot stand to be without the sound of their own voice. The culture of listening is lost on a tourist. Caring to hear not just the words but the subtext and inferences. The unasked question. The way things are done without thought or question because, “That’s just how it is done. It’s our way”. Travelers take the knowledge of a lecture but only as assistance. A way to fit in and stand out less. A way to disguise their difference and put the locals more at ease in their presence. Travelers are uncomfortable with demonstrations. They do not want an artificial display. They want the pulse increasing, perspiration inducing, laughter inflicting moments that come when a child first attempts to walk. They want to be that child making mistakes and learning from the errors. To have their hands held and guided by a proverbial mother or father. To watch and be shown and make an effort and fall down, and laugh with, and at the clumsiness until achievement is made. Or not made, but the effort was good and in an honest and legitimate attempt a new found respect gained for those who can do a thing well. Travelers know that life stinks. Rot, decay and putrefaction are part of the lifecycle. Those smells are also a form of creation. Roses need fertilizer, mushrooms grow in darkness, wine is the sharp tang of sugar destroyed and transformed. Bowels and bladder empty at death and blood smells coppery. A tourist does not want these things. They want only the warm, soft comfortable scents that carry memories of home and hearth and so create a false sense of sameness between this world and the one from which they come. And they can return and nod knowingly, “They are just like us.” And their world is made smaller and more comfortable by that belief. Travelers know the world is huge and we are tiny specks and the sameness and difference is not in shit or roses but in our exposure and understanding and acceptance of each. At the heart of a traveler is the knowledge that a tourist is an intruder. An alien guest that must be watched and guarded and saved and protected and cannot cope with the reality of life in a world outside their own. This need creates a burden on its host. A burden that offends and annoys the tourist when it is acknowledged. How dare the host live in a world so different! So the host smiles and agrees and offers alternatives and compromises in an effort to be polite. And a mask is worn and civil decorum is taken as the norm in the face of insults and obscenity and rudeness. But a traveler knows the host is not on vacation. The people here are living real life. A life with pain and illness. A life with anger, annoyance, death and birth, marriage and separation. A life with rent, dishes, laundry, dusting, children to raise, spouses to accommodate, parents with expectations to meet. Friends and family that will not be gone in a day or a week or a month. A traveler recognizes these burdens and responsibilities and asks how can they share and lighten the load. A traveler stays lean in their demands. A traveler inquires and commiserates and sympathizes and celebrates. Not ever deluded they can assimilate in full but because being neighborly is the point of travel. And so a traveler is neither one nor the other but also part of both. And they revel in the sameness and the difference and only ask, “What more is there?”

Nepal reincarnated

Kathmandu
Tribal garb, cell phone and Hello Kitty socks.

Dust everywhere- sidewalks, streets, air and people covered in a thin gray film.

One shopkeeper sweeps his sidewalk and the next splashes water from a drinking bottle then closes his door in surrender.
The courtyard of the guesthouse a mass of construction noise, a pack of dogs rescued from the street and among it we drink masala tea.

We pass quickly in conversation through the women and children begging at the taxi window.

Horns honk and beep to announce their presence.
I sit still in the endless bustle and wonder,

"What were you Nepal, before the endless days of hustle? What had you been to deserve this?"

Egypt trip one

My first journey as a widow took me to Egypt. A cradle of civilization and the country my dearly departed had made plans to see at one point but had never gone.  A terrorist attack on a tourist sight and the young age of his children had caused him to postpone his journey.

My travel there caused me to draw, sketch and paint in a near desperate frenzy. I learned the pyramids are limestone and surrounded by fossil rock. 

I stood on the shores of the Nile while the sunset call to prayer echoed in the valley of the kings. 

I ate a meal with a family in Aswan who had decided their son would not go to school beyond 6th grade. The young man, as the male of the family was expected to support his parents as they aged and any higher education would offer him the potential to leave Egypt for work in other Middle Eastern countries. That was the course his father had chosen in life but he had other siblings who relieved him of parental responsibility. 

 It was only after returning to Wisconsin at the end of January that I came to realize the similarities between worlds halfway distant on the planet.

Remember Greece

Rememberance Day, lest we forget. 11/11 is  a day around the world when people commemorate those who died in war. How appropriate then that tonight I watched a Greek theatre production of Antigone by Sophocles.
Antigone is a woman punished horribly for honoring both her war-dead brothers, one of whom the king expressly forbade the decency of a funeral because he fought for the opposition. By the end the King lives haunted by the deaths of his wife, his son (Antigone’s fiance) and Antigone. 
It was a lean, modern minimalist production using barricade fences as the only set element. They were moved and dragged by the actors alone or in concert. Physical representations of each characters psychological limits and their intransigence. Barriers to communication and understanding.

I do not speak a word of Greek and yet the performances were so powerful that I cried along with the other audience members at the end.
Tears for a tragedy of war and the ego of unbending authority, written 2459 years ago in a language I do not speak. That is the power of theatre. That is the horror of war. Remember indeed. 

Sunrise

A lone white cat, white gull, crescent moon we wait

watching for the fishing boats and dawn to start the day. 

A single light on a boat. 

First elaborate birdsong accompanied by a sky turned pink at the edge. 

The last light of night, four stars aligned, pointing at the feeble moon. 

Pink glow of sunrise creeps brighter and the sun wins again today. 

A woman walks the boardwalk and the work of the day begins. 

Fishermen call across from boat to boat to shore and to the woman on shore. 

She imagines they have invited her to join them 

and she hides her shy, sly smile of desire and acceptance. 

Hello sunrise.

Strength of mountains. The heart of Crete.

She sits in a side street so narrow I doubt even a compact car could pass.
She is as quiet as the village or indeed as the mountain which looms overhead
Like many women I have seen in the villages she is dressed in black. A plain black dress, black hose, flat sensible shoes and gray hair pulled into a bun, low at the back of the head.
She sits unmoving as I come toward her in this narrow place.
Her face is weathered and lined and her eyes sunken deep into the sockets.
As I wonder if she has lost her sight, she turns her head to watch me pass.
The eyes are the blue of the water I swam in earlier in the day.
Like the shores along the deep sea which surround this island home, her face is rugged, cragged and worn.
Her joys and sorrows, the stories that have made up her life are etched deep.
The sparks of blue are steel and her hair is not gray but flint.
In those eyes a fire of strength and independence still burns brightly.
I am startled by the strange beauty and long to capture it on film.
She dismisses my clumsy request with a backhanded gesture of her outstretched arm.
I am not of her world and I am dismissed.
I leave her there under the shadow of the mountain.
Her thoughts untold fathoms and as mysterious as the ocean depths. 

I see many of her soul sisters on this island and later learn of the WWII resistance and the Nazi retribution as a result. I am stunned by the strength these women show. Not in the shallow “Me too” expression currently in vogue. It is a strength I am happy I have never had to experience. A strength that serves beyond the individual. A strength of a nations soul bound to the stone and mountains it grows on. 

Crete, creator of man.

Odd that everything about Crete and its people seem designed to make me want to stay or return here. And yet, the people here have been travelers and sailors since pre-history. Pre history takes on new meaning here. It is not the time of writing. It is the time when myths and legends were created. Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon and Kronos, men and Gods and giants intertwined. Time so deep in our bones that writing was created to define it. Writing to give it permanence and then shape and blend that legend into new experiences which, hold at their heart the seed of time itself. Like a dried pomegranate with the juice, red as blood, waiting within. 

The core of our existence before clocks or print or Internet. Time told in the age of mountains, trees and streams marked the lives of men and beast. A time of muscle and bone and sinew. Man created, because of need and excelled to assert domination over the beasts and nature that tried to bring the ego-filled creature down to earth again. And man stood tall and said no, we shall conquer all that is before us. We will not cower in caves but build temples. We will not long for, yet fear the sea we will build ships and ride the storms. We, this race called man, will form and create a world in an image we choose. 

Only then did man say, now we shall write of our ancestors who conquered nature, and in writing they will be remembered. So Crete at its heart is a place to move from and yet the soul knows it began here, in this place of conquest.