I’ve been in Greece for the last two and a half days, and have been trying to get the hang of its pace.  I’ve known this pace before in Mexico, but as an American, it’s so damned drummed into my head that I need to be doing something all the time.  Trying to be useful.  Collecting and organizing stuff.  It’s very hard to just stop.  A few years ago when I was studying in France, my French singing professor sniffed, “You damn Americans.  You just can’t be still.  You have to be doing all the time.”  And honestly, I didn’t take offense.  What’s true is true.

I’ve never been to Greece before.  It’s oddly like my fantasies, but also very different.  I had kept Greece on a “go for a honeymoon list,” but since I turn 50 this July and am still unmarried, I decided to screw the hope of a honeymoon as an excuse and just come here.

I am on Hydra, which has outlawed motor vehicles, so if you want to get somewhere you walk or hire a water taxi, and if you want to move something heavy, you hire a donkey and its handler.  The lack of engines makes the island blissfully quiet, except for the morning chorus of roosters strutting their stuff on the hillsides and an occasional complaining bleat from a donkey tired of being roped up in the shade.

The seawater here IS navy blue.  And the hillsides are much like my memories of the mountains surrounding Tucson, Arizona: barren and rocky, with scraggly pine and olive trees clinging to the cliffs, scrubby bushes, and blooming succulents.  It’s a fishing village, so as you walk, the smell of either fresh fish, or grilling fish is in the air.  There are cats everywhere--skinny cats of every color combination with long legs and long slender tails.  They loll around the pier, looking for fish scraps, or roll on their backs beguilingly in the sun.  They sleep on the cushions of chairs in outdoor restaurants. 

They also beg while you’re eating.  Which is charming until it includes claws climbing your legs.  At last night’s restaurant the waiters were constantly chasing this male kitty away from diners with plastic spray bottles filled with water.

It is only June, and to this Clevelander, it’s HOT already.  I see people from France hiking on the rocky footpaths all over the island wearing sweaters and I cannot understand it at all.  Especially when the sweaters are black in the blinding sunlight.  I wear a hat, as little clothing that modesty will allow and keep to the shade.

In the last few days I’ve had to do a lot of sitting and waiting.  Three hour wait in the Marseille airport.  Three hour wait for the boat to Hydra from Athens.  Today, waiting in the sun for an hour for a boat to take me to a beach on the other side of the island.  And then waiting again for the boat to take me back.

Once I spent six weeks in Mexico, much of it in the Chiapas rainforest.  While there, I grew a whole new understanding of the meaning of waiting.  To the Lacandon Maya in Chiapas, a wait for someone who is rumored to be coming might mean sitting for days in wait at a specified location until that person appears.  After returning from Mexico, I had planned to meet my sister at a southern Ohio hotel, on route to a family gathering.  I got to the hotel two hours before she did.  I was still so infused with “Mexico time,” that I just sat on the curb in front of the hotel in the sunshine, and waited.  For two hours.  No book, no iphone, nothing.  Just sitting and waiting.

There is a pleasure and a freedom in “just sitting,” if I can stop the relentless anxious badminton game in my head—the shuttlecock bouncing from “what if ___________ happens?”  to work obligations, to the snarling misdemeanors of those I perceive as having wronged me, to my existential worries about life and purpose—if I can stop playing the game, I can rest in my own silence.  The back and forth in my brain does nothing good for me—it’s a habit of filling my mind with stuff that doesn’t matter.  If I can breathe and let go of that stuff, there is peace and the opportunity for beauty to come visiting.

Here in Greece I’m re-learning that if I can let go of the memories of shopkeepers who have been rude to me and concentrate on the bougainvillea outside my hotel window, if I can let myself have a few hours on a beach chair with no agenda, if I can accept that as a human animal I can just be, like other animals on this planet, suddenly there is quiet in my mind and I can wait.  If what I’m waiting for doesn’t materialize, I can wait some more and consider new options.  I am re-learning that there is always a wait, even between every exhalation and inhalation.  Between every day and night.  Between the moment you speak and I listen.  It is the rhythm of living, right under my nose, just behind my eyelids, and I’m trying to let go and welcome it with open hands.

Text and photos copyright voicegal 2010