The cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Brilliance of the Seas was more of a vacation than part of my official Sabbatical project. It was wonderful to spend time with my husband, Walter, and to enjoy a trip together. We haven’t really gone on a vacation together since our wedding in 2019, so this was long overdue. For this blog post, I’m really just going to share a couple of relevant stories and a ton of photos.
On our day in Mykonos, we spent part of the day on a completely different island called Delos. It is one of the most important mythological, historical, and archaeological sites in all Greece. There is archaeological evidence that this island has been inhabited since the third millennium BC. Between 900 BC and 100 AD, Delos was a major sacred center for Dionysus and Leto, Apollo and Artemis. Our guide described tiny Delos, an extremely densely populated island, as a combination of Manhattan (for its cosmopolitan importance), Vatican City (for its religious importance), and Geneva (for its financial importance) all rolled into one. There were splendid houses and poor homes with people from all over the known world, there were Synagogues, Monasteries, and Pagan Temples, and there were treasuries of all kinds. On Delos, we sat in the ancient amphitheater where she asked the question, “So, can anyone tell me what Greeks love to do?” There were several answers - drink, dance, eat. She affirmed all of these and added one more, which these three lead to… “We love to tell story.” And thus the theater was born. She elaborated, “We love to eat and drink and dance. These things are the beginning of our celebrations together. When we get together we celebrate who we are and where we came from and we tell our story. And this is what the Greeks did thousands of years ago to pass their story on to one another and to their children.” I was thinking about this a lot and came to the conclusion that the Greeks aren’t the only ones that did this - we all do. Perhaps they began the formal arrangement of the theater, but we’ve been eating and telling stories together since humanity first learned to light fire and gather around the campsite to share meal and story together. And for me, that’s what this Sabbatical is all about - the rich diversity of cultures and the growing ways we have found to eat together and tell our stories, to pass on to our children the richness of our own culture, beliefs, family values, etc….
And the second story I’ll share is one that is more on a personal level, but intertwined with everything. As I mentioned during my trip to Spain, I was overcome by the sense of my sister’s presence in an unexpected place. It turned out that I was surrounded by peacocks everywhere I went in Cordoba. A bird that my sister loved and had all over her house. My guide in Cordoba told me that the peacock was the symbol of eternity used by many different cultures. On Delos, our guide also told another story of peacocks from Ancient Greece. Zeus was the almighty God of Olympus whose wife’s name was Hera. Hera had a peacock whose 100 eyes kept watch over everything, including her husband, whose many flirtatious encounters begat various additional gods and demigods. Zeus cursed the peacock and said that although it might be able to see everything, it would no longer have a beautiful voice to share the news with Hera.
And now some photos:
Athens and the Parthenon in the Acropolis.
Delos:
Mykonos:
Argostoli:
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