Monday, September 22nd, 2008 ~ Santorini, Greece
(this is the continuation of a travel journal that begins with the September 10th entry further below)
You may think that it is funny that I will be glad to leave the beautiful island of Santorini today, but glad I am. I have even counted the hours a few times. It’s not that it isn’t exquisite. It is magnificent in many ways. But it is raw, and rough in ways I never imagined from my postcard-view imagination.
This island was once named “Strongoli”…the round one. Now it is a crescent that cradles the volcano that reshaped it…many times. And I know in my bones it will someday do so again. Though I also know it will not be while I am here it is a little like riding the Titanic for a few minutes. Strange and intense. I feel the lost worlds too…the civilizations that disappeared. The only difference between here and Pompeii is that people still live here, and that the destruction of an entire people here has happened more than once.
It isn’t about fear. And it isn’t, truly, that land elsewhere hasn’t experienced just as much trauma at one point or another. It is the seismic activity that has kept me restless and clenching my teeth in my sleep. It is the primordial movements constantly occurring. Perhaps it is the loss of Atlantis that aches in my bones, and the fact that we would face a common fate if our world didn’t shift enough in time.
It was the Hotel Atlantis that we ironically took shelter in on our first night here when the storm arrived when we did became torrential and made rivers of the streets and lightning and thunder erupted everywhere. Then, yesterday, it was sunny and we went to the Red Beach which was the highlight of our time here. The rocky cliffs were truly red and the volcanic pebbles of the beach itself were beautiful and unique. They also happened to produce a large number of agates, to my wonderful delight. That’s what roughness often does though…polishes and crystallizes and cleanses.
So for this special day, autumn equinox, I wish for myself and for all of you that any recent roughness be something that produces a great beauty as softness returns. Wish me good journeys as we return to Athens (just a few hours to go…)
Love, Jennifer
