Winter’s last sting swirls in the slow, serene video above, but things have changed.
Spring flowers are bursting forth from the mountainside, bees are humming, and I’m back in the land of constant wifi and electricity, following a winter retreat on Mount Athos, Greece.
I’m not so sure leaving is such a good thing! Returning to the world is a strange experience, bringing a discernible “inner peace” back with me, but knowing its slow erosion by noise, speed, distraction, and worldly concerns is almost inevitable.
There is some consolation, however: from where I write this in Kosovo, a discernible peace has descended as Ramadan and Lent fall together, and most Muslims, some Catholics, and Orthodox Christians take the opportunity to fast.
Maybe ‘fasting’ should be called ‘slowing’ because fasting calls on you to slow down.
The rhythmic, ascetic life plays tricks with time, and the Monks on Mount Athos have something precious, something many of us spend a lot of time and money chasing: time itself.
Up there, there’s time to slow down, reflect, and, if necessary, discuss things in depth. The days still tumble by, but there is time, time to let the stories, images, memories, temptations and fantasies flow, go and disappear into all-enveloping silence.
There were plenty of Americans and other English speakers up there to stimulate good discussions with, too. Now, how can that be? On a wintery crag in Greece, as far away from the regualr world as it is possible to get?
While away, I took the time to start a new book tentatively entitled “Sorjourns, Stories and Songlines,” which currently covers writings from fourteen different countries during the period 1990-2025. I’m working towards publishing it as a regular book and maybe here on sub-stack, too. So stay tuned!
No matter how far away you go to “get away from it all,” though, it’s really more like confronting it all, and there’s always someone like me seeking a story. Running into journalist Christos Nickolaidis on the mountainside, though, was a genuine pleasure.
Christos recorded several interviews for broadcast on the Greek TV Channel SKAI, including the following video, in which I somehow managed to get a book plugin, too.
None of this was planned, of course, which is the way these things work out…
Coda:
Paid subscribers have exclusive access to a collection of documentary photographs gathered over the past eight years in the link below:
Four Seasons on Athos
The photographs here have been taken over eight years and are still a work in progress.
Share this post