In the Dodecanese Islands
Not Far from Turkey
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| Icon at the Monastery of St. John the Theologian, Patmos |
A week ago, on my 52nd birthday, I woke up thinking of my father. He's been gone two years now, but I woke up that morning, took an orange in my hand, and heard his instruction all over again. How to hold the orange in hand. How to take the sharp point of the short knife. How to carve four ways, into the skin, then peel it to expose the fruit itself. He had his ways, my father, and some were (frankly) maddening. But I remembered him a week ago, with gratitude, as I pulled apart a sweet piece of fruit, feeling the sections give to my gentle pull. As time goes along, I remember him that way: a guy with a knife and an orange. In the end, what he wanted most was for me to enjoy that orange.
Strangely, I realized last week that my father turned 52 just a month before I was ordained to the Christian ministry in 1989. I wish I could swing back that way and have a couple of conversations we never had. But that's so often the way it is.
I thought of him again yesterday as the huge ferry picked up steam heading north out of Rhodes. I lay down on an open-air bench and let the tangy fresh spirit wash me clean: islands everywhere, the sea crystal blue, the world a radiant light. I know there's conflict, and I know it's close: a troubled economy in Greece, tension always in Cyprus, and madness in Damascus. But for nine hours yesterday--a nine hour ferry from Rhodes here to Patmos--the world is with God, God is with the world, and everything sings praise. Dad had a whole different vocabulary for these things: but the ocean did the same for him. It renewed his spirit; it gave him something deep and sweet to sleep on.
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| The Dodecanese Islands from the Ferry |
Except for a couple of catnaps on deck, I couldn't close my eyes all day. I had to watch: the islands sliding by, the diamond-studded waves, the sun's symphonic setting. I'm quite sure I didn't need the Aegean to show me all this. It's there on Monterey Bay, and San Francisco Bay; it's there in the little stream that trickles through the Pogonip. But I spent nine hours at sea yesterday, and I was so grateful for every last one of them. For the salt and the wind and the light and the sun and the moon and the darkening of things.
In one of her many, many inspired poems, Mary Oliver puts it this way:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowingI guess that's what yesterday was about for me: holding it against my bones, BEING ITSELF, sea and sun, joy and wonder and wistfulness, memories and people and even my soul. The letting go part will come, in its time. It always does. But yesterday was about holding, cherishing, knowing. Living in this world. Thanks, Dad.
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
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| Steps at the Marco Polo Hotel in Rhodes |
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| Mosque and Busy Old Town, Rhodes |
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| Island from Ferry Deck, Sunset |
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| Orthodox Priest Visiting Monastery, Patmos |
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| John Sharing Revelation with Scribe, Icon on Cave of Apocalypse |
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| First Stop: Symi |
