URSABLOG: A Feast Of Light

So the Christmas season draws to a close, on this the twelfth day of Christmas. Real life is returning – if indeed it ever went away – and the challenges of the year ahead are arriving – inexorably, inevitably – and with them the tensions between what we are and what we would like to be, what we are doing and what we could do, and what we have and what we want.

This year I have resolved completely and thoroughly not to make any New Year‘s Resolutions because I have found that they are just a way of making me depressed when they fizzle out by February at the latest. I am still smoking, I am still drinking, I am still thinking I should get some serious exercise without actually doing any, I am still pushing myself to finally grow up. I have found that change is not something I can force on myself, as if just because I have decided something it will then automatically happen. Long experience tells me otherwise.

That is not to mean that I will lie back passively and do nothing, in fact that is something I find very hard to do. But instead of trying change what I am, or even what I do, perhaps that the best way of improving myself is to change how I do it. We all have to be fed – physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually even – but we don’t have to eat crap all the time. And I have eaten very well this Christmas.

In fact this festive season has been one of the most magical in memory. Maybe this was because for once I did not plan much, but just lived it to the full and opened myself to the gifts of others, and have been rewarded by far more than I gave myself.

On Christmas Day I was invited by friends to join them for lunch with their families. But this was not just food and drink, but music, and singing, and dancing, and conversation, and making new friends, and, well, living. Sharing their lives, over different traditions, religions, generations, and histories. Being welcomed as an equal to share with them in their love for each other was something that I will never forget. This has now become for me the new gold standard of how Christmas Day should be kept.

For New Year I had decided that I would go, by myself, to the island of Ikaria for a few days: to read, walk, eat, rest and recharge, and prepare for the year ahead. I figured that in order to find peace I should stay away from the mountains of mainland Greece – and certainly Athens – and Ikaria was not likely to be full of big parties. In fact as it turned out, it was more or less closed.

Closed but not empty. The island holds a very special place in my heart, and to go back again, in winter, was to connect again with the unique, healing energy I had experienced during my previous visits. It is also a very beautiful place, and as I walked through the trees and across the mountainsides the views – in glorious weather – took my breath away. Such beauty allowed me to connect with other beauty in my life, appreciate it and celebrate it. I felt myself a very lucky man.

And that was before I was invited to dinner. I was staying in an apartment rented out by the owners of the bakery below. They invited me to share New Year’s Eve with them and their wider family. Once again I was welcomed into the heart of a special feast, not just from the obligation of hospitality, but also as an act of pure generosity. Once again I had been adopted by Greeks, by Greece, and once again I was blown away by these acts of kindness to a stranger. I ate, I drank, I was welcome, and shared in their lives.

And this was repeated the following night, and I met more people, and ate more, and drank more, and was made welcome again. I only hope that I was able to show my appreciation sufficiently.

Today is the Feast of Epiphany, and the saint’s day for Agia Theofania (Άγια Θεοφάνεια), and the Feast of Light, or Phota (Φώτα). I am writing from Piraeus where earlier today – according to tradition – they threw a cross into the water, and sailors from a Hellenic Navy vessel dived into the water to retrieve it. After this all the ships in port were blessed, and all the horns of the vessels sounded in unison in celebration of the day, in celebration of the gift of light, evident today in beautiful, brilliant sunshine in a perfectly blue sky.

On one day in Ikaria, I walked too far, and rather than risk a short cut across the slopes of a mountain in the fading light, I thought it wiser to retreat downhill. I found a café, and after a while I found the one taxi driver working. He turned up eventually and our conversation – with him speaking in English and me replying in Greece, as though we were both trying to make life easy on the other – after touching on religion, nationality, hope and quantum physics, turned to the uniqueness of Ikaria.

“If you come here to take from, to use, to exploit the place, the island will not give you anything, in fact it will reject you. But if you come here to be, to accept, to be open, then you will find healing, even if it’s not what you came for, even if you didn’t think you needed it.” He was not only talking about the people, but – and I agree with him – the mysterious energy of the place.

I think that healing – if we are lucky – is not about making things perfect again, but putting things back together – after pain, after experience, after joy and loss – and then being able accept ourselves as who we really are, and who we have become, not who we might want to be, or should be. And there will always remain scars, flaws, and cracks.

In Japan kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. Kintsugi treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, not something to hide, creating a different, unique and random beauty radically different from the perfectly preserved, unused and unlived museum piece gathering dust.

Most of the time however, we are not completely broken and don’t need to be taken apart to be repaired. Nevertheless, cracks appear from the stresses and strains of life, from the repetitive pressures that we absorb just to remain standing. In most cases the cracks don’t need repairing, and are left as they are. And this is just as well, for as Leonard Cohen put it:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

Χρόνια πολλά!

Simon Ward

www.ursashipbrokers.gr