Tending the Fire, Part Two
Time-Place-Rituals
In case you missed it, here is Part One
She is not coming. Wind tells me so—wind delivers his message with such clarity I cannot doubt him. Rain decided not to drop by and changed her course. There is nothing I can do to change her mind, so I wish her farewell, all the while breathing in the resinous scent that pines and cypresses lavishly emit now that she is out of the picture. The picture, however, is very much alive; the sky an ever-shifting grey mass of clouds that conceal the sun but give every surface a deep, saturated sheen, and the air, laden with secrets, circulates inconspicuously, passing on earth’s most intimate song.
I wonder if the vibration of my phone, hidden inside my backpack, disturbs the land. I dismiss the thought—how am I to fault myself for living in these times? How come this second thought doesn’t make me feel any better? Rather guilty for the violations the world endures from humankind, which, having forgotten the meaning of its self-imposed title, smugly wears it as a crown, and destroys all other kinds, even its own.
What kind am I?
The loving one, my heart replies.
The foolish one, my mind retorts, and goes on spilling forth a long list of adjectives I refuse to repeat aloud.
I’ve been silent all my life, keeping my mouth shut, keeping a low profile, keeping up appearances, and for what? No matter what, I cannot keep this part of my mind from mocking me at every chance. If I were to raise my voice, Hill, if I were to shout and scream, would you mind?
Mind you, mind is a deceitful word—words are deceitful beings with multiple lives and histories that stretch back in time. Once upon a time, the Old English time as dictionaries call it, mind was gemynd, borrowed from the Old High German gimunt, meaning memory, that too borrowed from older times, going back to the Proto-Indo-European root men-, which dictionaries define as “to think,” and relate it to qualities of mind or states of thought. Mind you (again), this is only one of the four(?) alternate meanings assigned to this root, a root that unsurprisingly forms also the Greek words, mneme and anamnesis—memory and remembrance. Now these two words open up different doors, but I have no inclination to walk through these for the time being—time being all messed up; nearly a month has passed since my walk on the hill, and every time I sit down to write something new comes up, pulling me towards new directions, and yet here I am—not on the hill, heading merrily up where I was supposed to be, but pinned down to my desk, mulling over the meaning of words that cross millennia, steppes, mountains, and seas, always in search for fertile lands to take root.
I have forsaken my roots. I ditched translations and began reading English books years ago. I spend my days speaking Greek and writing English. Lately, I dream in both—how that happened and why I cannot tell. But let me tell you this: it can be tiresome at times, this bilingual affair, and somewhat disorientating.
Where am I to find my centre of gravity linguistically? *
…
Native tongues.
Adopted tongues.
I have forgotten my roots. Or so I thought. But thinking involves memory, and memory goes hand in hand with time, and space is the twin sister of time, as Terry Tempest Williams writes. And she goes on: If we have open space then we have open time to breathe, to dream, to dare, to play, to pray, to move freely, so freely, in a world our minds have forgotten, but our bodies remember. Time and space. This partnership is holy.
Somewhere inside you, or outside of you, or maybe in between, there flows all you need to know. Give it time to roam, and the body will remember where it came from. Give it space and the mind, free from thoughts, will remember what the heart has never forgotten.
All knowledge is but remembrance, said Plato, and my aversion to his teachings that I had cherry-picked throughout my adolescence softened a bit when I read these words, but never really melted away. Yet this quote, which I underlined in a book almost thirty years ago, has stayed with me ever since. I took a rather long detour to finally arrive at Plato, all the way from the United Kingdom and Francis Bacon, then to Argentina and Jorge Luis Borges, a true lover of languages whose Greek edition of The Aleph grew old with me, its yellowed pages filled with marginalia. And though I’ve read the book in English as well, I return again and again to that Greek tattered copy; Achilleas Kyriakidis’ translation surpasses the English one. Maybe I am biased. Maybe I have not given up entirely on my native language after all. Maybe it’s time for me to return to it with new eyes and an open mind.
Can we learn to speak a language indigenous to the heart? *
Consider this rambling another detour, for during my Solstice walk, I didn’t stop by the mysterious duet that sits not far from Sentinel. I had paid my respects on a previous visit and scarcely thought of these two rocky figures, biding their time together forever at the northwestern base of the hill. What a sovereign couple, I thought when I first stood before them, and kept coming back, for there was something I sensed they wanted to tell me.
Land speaks with no words, yet the native land’s words are laden with hints that help you navigate whatever terrain you tread on. I stumbled upon an old word yesterday while researching the etymology of mind, totally unrelated to the men- root, as is nous—its etymology uncertain up to this day, and its bibliography so vast I dare not delve into it. No, I wish to tell you about another word, one that resides in the torso, one that the ancient Greeks used interchangeably for:
the mind (as the seat of the mental faculties, perception, thought)
the heart (as the seat of the passions)
the will, purpose
the midriff
Phrēn was considered to be the physical localization of the thūmos, which meant ‘heart, spirit’ - the realm of consciousness, of rational and emotional functions or in other words, the human capacity to feel and to think, taken together.
The Greeks once understood that feeling and thinking were parts of the same process. They/we forgot, but the land reminds us what we once felt and knew; without the union of heart and mind, we lose our bearings.
Now, if you allow me, I’ll take one giant leap and land in China. They have a word there that is akin to phrēn—heart-mind, they call it (xin), look it up and decide for yourselves whether my leap makes any sense. I am tired of all these words today, and I must get back on the hill to pick up the thread I left by the Sentinel.
***
What kind am I?
The loving one, my heart replies.
The foolish one, my mind retorts, and goes on spilling forth a long list of adjectives I refuse to repeat aloud.
The phone keeps buzzing.
Denouncing my kind is not an option—a loving fool I am.
Are you coming, love? I ask S over the phone, pretty sure he’s on his way already.
to be continued
...I've too much to say. Or rather, I've too much to feel
they do look like a family of bears though too, or maybe wolves. One is the mother and another is her child. Maybe I even see the third, a baby one- or it might be the mother's paw. They're sad. And very kind.
The stones, I explained
I see their faces
I like this Fotini as much as the other, maybe more, but it says “to be continued,” so I hope to find out. 😊