A Poem That Can Change Your Life…
With its beauty. Its clarity. Its wisdom. And, above all…
With what it showed me — and I hope will show you — about finding life, purpose and meaning, even in the midst of terror, pain and loss.
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“Holy shit. Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it.”
It’s September 19, 1984. I’m on a bus to Volos, a dusty seaport on the east side of Greece, half-way between Athens and Thessaloniki.
Six months ago, I won a grant to live a year in Greece and Turkey, study Greek myths, and figure out ‘what to do with my life’.
It was a dream come true.
But now?
I’m jet-lagged, excited, overwhelmed. Sitting on a bus in a strange country, with a year of unknown, unpredictable events stretching before me.
Looking around, the phrase “It’s greek to me” pops into my head.
I can decipher the alphabet (the exit on the bus reads ‘Exodus’.) But it sounds nothing like the Berlitz ‘Learn Greek’ tapes I was listening to last week.
Volos is where Jason and the Argonauts left from, so it’s a good place to start my adventure. It’s also the gateway to Mount Pelion, a mountainous peninsula full of orchards and forests, and site of the epic battle between the giants and the gods of Mt. Olympus.
Volos is a non-descript, industrial and concrete city. Rebuilt after a massive earthquake in 1955 where none of the old buildings survived, and I’m happy to leave it. I start walking the road to Makrinitsa — a village of traditional stone houses clinging to the side of a mountain — that’s my eventual destination.
The road rises gradually through fields, small clusters of houses, and then starts winding its way up the slopes into the mountains. Into walnut orchards. Apple orchards. Small forests. And olive groves.
As I walk, I can see farmers working in their fields. They nod and exchange ‘yassous’ as we pass. Peasants lead loaded donkeys up and down the road, and small stone houses and fountains nestle in the woods on either side of the road.
The sun is hot on my head and shoulders. But in the shade the air is cool and fresh, and gets cooler as I climb higher. As dusk falls, and before it’s too dark to see, I find a place near the road to spend the night.
Unrolling my sleeping bag, I sit down and eat the bread, cheese and olives I bought that morning. I’m in the center of an olive grove. The grove is next to a small graveyard surrounded by a head-high stone wall and tall, dark green popsicle-like Cypress trees.
As the sun goes down, the olives’ twisted limbs and narrow, silvery grey leaves blur into inky black shapes that loom around me. The day’s breezes and rustling leaves slow and then stop. The insects go silent and a deep, liquid stillness soaks into the earth around me.
Sliding my legs into the sleeping bag, I lie on my back and look up. The sky is dark — the darkest I’ve ever seen it— and the stars are like diamonds scattered across velvet.
Shifting my gaze, I see the Milky Way for the first time in my life.
It is a river of light flowing across the heavens like milk spilt on a kitchen table. A wide, glowing pathway from one end of creation to the other…
And in an instant, as I gaze up into the night sky, everything shifts.
I feel the immensity of space. I’m no longer lying on the earth looking up, but hanging over an abyss, the depth of the unvierse falling away below me.
If the planet let go of me, I would fall forever. Into nothingness. And oblivion.
And then my awareness leaves the planet until I’m somewhere in space, and looking back at my body from very far away.
I’m a tiny dust mote of awareness on a tiny pebble of rock and fire that’s hurtling through space. With the thinnest smear of life and air nursing and protecting me.
And that pebble is as insignificant and small in the universe as I am to it…
The realisation hits me like an earthquake or a tsunami — sweeping everything before it…
I am alone.
And I am going to die.
In Buddhism it’s said we have two ‘awakening’ moments in our lives.
The first is when we discover our mortality, that we are going to die.
The second is when we discover our immortality, that we will never die.
(We just change costumes…)
This (I see now) is my ‘first’ moment. And I don’t know what to do with it.
Feeling insignificant, tiny, cosmically alone, my mind is a swirl of wonder, terror and awe. I snuggle like a burrowing animal deeper into my sleeping bag and go to sleep.
The next morning, I finish the bread and cheese, fill my backpack and start walking. As I walk, three questions — questions that lay at the heart of my year’s quest — chase each other through my head, as I struggle to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.
The questions are:
“Who am I?”
“What do I have to offer the world?”
“And how can I make that offering valid?”
The answer comes — as unexpectedly as last night’s vision — in the shape of a slim, green paperback, Voices of Modern Greece: Selected Poems, I’d bought 3 days ago in Athens.
Paging through it, I come across the poem, “An Old Man on the Riverbank”. It’s written by George Seferis, a modern Greek poet who won the Nobel prize for poetry in 1963.
The poem transfixes me, piercing me to the heart of my fears and desires. Piercing me with the questions it asks and the questions it answers. Questions about how and why I act. About simplifying my life and expression to feel the essence of things. About following my deepest truths and meanings in life.
The line “and it’s time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail” says it all.
And then I get to the bottom of the poem and read the real punchline — when and where it was written — Cairo 1942.
This was a dark time in the world when the Nazi war machine was triumphant everywhere and Germany’s ‘Afrika Korps’ was advancing closer and closer to Cairo. Seferis’ homeland, Greece, was invaded and occupied. People he knew and loved — friends and family — were being arrested, tortured and shot.
And if that wasn’t enough, Seferis was also a diplomat for the Greek Government in Exile, so he had daily, intimate knowledge of the chaos, pain and suffering of a world at war.
This extraordinary and beautiful poem, this expression of his soul, was his refuge and antidote.
So… Go ahead and read the poem now (click the link below to read it.)
Read it with an open heart. Read it out loud and hear its music, it pauses, its cadence. And ask yourself…
“What are my words?”
“What does my soul need to say?”
Say them. It’s your time now.
Because… if not now. When?
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Be well,
Andrew
June 2018
