Traveling with Pomegranates (38 page)

A breeze swirls up, ruffling the swag of tin offerings in the tree, causing light to dart and scatter. I take out my new black journal so I can set down some of my thoughts on paper, but pause first to read the Rumi quote I recorded on the front page:
We are pain / and what cures pain, both. We are / the sweet, cold water and the jar that pours.

Putting an epigraph at the beginning of this journal felt compulsory. I did it for the other two trips, I reasoned. How could I not come up with another one? Except every quotation I found seemed artificially induced. Just words I was plucking out of a book and imposing. The lines from Rumi, though, reminded me of the dream I had before Ann’s wedding about dispensing water to dying mothers. They sparked against something on the inside of me.

Rereading the words now, it’s apparent they also resonate with the brooding I’ve been doing about the world and the questions that have begun to simmer inside of me: What will I leave behind? What will become of the world? What indentation will my work make? Why do I make myself audible like this? For what purpose?

I’ve always written because I wanted to.
Had
to. Because it was the necessary fire. I don’t imagine any of that will change. But now, with the years moving by so fast and the darkness in the hive growing, I do find myself drawn to this poetic notion of Rumi’s about being the water and the jar that pours it.

In my thirties, an apprentice writer myself, I was more concerned with figuring out how to express the truth of my soul than worrying about the suffering world and how I should respond to it. I was focused on that whole matter of serving the work. The burning question back then was whether my work was true to my voice and my vision. Was it
real
? I would go into small agonies about it. I’m sure that’s because unvarnished authenticity was always the conflict for me. It was easier and simpler to please the culture and the family that shaped me than to uncover and tell my own truth. When I wrote
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
, however, that conflict was shattered. The old, burning question died away.

A new overriding question has surfaced now, I realize: What does my work serve? I suspect the impulse to find a purpose for my writing that’s larger than myself has grown out of my experience in the burial chamber in Gavrinis, France, when I discovered the need to identify with the “billion lights” and find a simple return to love. And yes, it’s accentuated by the grandmothering spirit that rises in the last third of life.

I write all this down in my journal with a certain trepidation. It could sound full of loftiness and heroic delusion to some. I don’t want to kid myself. There is wisdom in refusing the role of savior and accepting my limitations. Turning fifty involved making a severe peace with the fact that I cannot give birth to every egg in my ovaries or every potential in my soul. To say nothing of the way motives sometimes get mixed when the scheme is grand: what starts out as serving the world can easily turn into serving one’s self. The opposite side of it, though, is the long, slow retreat into indifference and cynicism.

The air gusts up again, and I hear a hollow, echoing sound like the clatter of a bamboo wind chime. Then it dies away, and the walled world is silent. Even my mind shuts down and I
experience
the silence that I’m always reading and writing about. And here is what rises in me: There is a time when you are simply seized by tenderness for the world, that’s all. When you come home to it, like Mary finding her way back to the tree and the wide world. When you decide you want your work to serve some part of that, too.

When the tree is deserted and everyone in the group has wandered off to visit the church or rummage through the shop where the nuns sell their lace, I open the gate on the iron fence that surrounds the tree. Am I trespassing? Stepping through, I look guiltily over both shoulders, then wade into the shadows around the base of the trunk. I pick my way over the arthritic old roots, circling around to the icon.

Staring at Mary through the plate glass, I’m arrested by how close and personal she feels without the fence between us. I’d forgotten the smoldering brown eyes. I stand there for a few seconds, staring at them, disarmed, self-conscious, listening for footsteps, for the nuns coming to haul me out.

I make myself think back to the prayer I uttered about becoming a novelist when I was here in 1993, back over the circuitous way things unfolded after that, and I get a whole tableau of pictures. The image of bees in the wall that wanted to become a story. The writing teacher pronouncing its potential small. The bee lighting on my shoulder in Ephesus like an epiphany, like a tiny cymbal crash, and all the determination this visitation set off in me. The moment in Rocamadour when I knew I had to send what I’d written out there. The phone call in the optometrist’s office. Then trekking from my desk to the dock through the summer as I finally finished the book.

I reach in my bag for the small jar of South Carolina honey I’ve brought as my thank-you offering, relieved the jar has actually made it over here in one piece in the plastic bag at the bottom of my suitcase.

I unscrew the lid and pour the contents across the tree roots. The air is flooded with the powerful scent of sweetness. I watch the honey ooze over the roots into the dirt, how it leaves dark, glistening stains on the bark. Dipping two fingers inside the empty jar, I scrape a little more from the side and dab it onto the glass over the icon, over the Madonna’s heart.

The padded steps of a nun intrude. Compared to the others, she is young and tall, though she’s got to be fifty and no more than five foot two. She carries a tubular loaf of bread and what looks like sticks of incense. When she looks at me, I freeze like I’ve been caught drawing a mustache on Mary instead of dousing her in gratitude. But the nun only nods and breezes by with a scruffy black dog traipsing behind her.

Turning back to the icon, I press my hand onto the smudge of honey on the glass and think how
funny
that I ended up with Mary, with this devotion. As I look at her, though, I know she is not a figure in a tree or in a church, but a presence inside. She is a way to meet the divinity in myself. Even now she fuels the conversation that is trying to form in me about my writing, about Rumi’s sweet, cold water and the jar that pours it.

Gathered at banquet-style tables, our group has just polished off dinner at a restaurant in Delphi. I am stuffed on
dolmadhes
—grapevine leaves filled with rice, lentils, and feta. As the servers clear away the dishes, we push our chairs into a horseshoe. There is no dance floor, but there will be dancing.

The columns around the room are the same burnt-orange color as the pyracantha that bloom all over town like burning bushes. Their berries have rained cinderlike onto the narrow pedestrian streets. Mom and I slogged through them on the walk here from the hotel, cutting through what seemed like people’s backyards, past tiny balconies where towels hung to dry beside the geraniums. In ancient times, Delphi was known as the center of the world. As we walked, I told Mom the story of how Zeus located it by sending an eagle from the east and an eagle from the west. They met in Delphi, and the spot was marked by a stone called the Omphalos, or the navel.

As the first notes of a clarinet pipe through the speakers in the restaurant, I push “record” on my video camera. The troupe—three women and four men—springs into the room, holding hands. Forming a circle, they skip—graceful, controlled, perfectly in step with each other. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a dance scene like this painted on ancient Greek vases in archaeological museums. I watch the dancers’ feet bounce off the smooth stone floor as the tassels on the men’s hose whisk the air and their pleated
foustanellas
flutter around their thighs. Costas, the leader of the troupe, is easy to spot in his bright red sash.

The music speeds up. Everyone, including me, sways in their seats. Camera flashes break across the dancers’ faces as the song ends suddenly and the women get in touch with their inner cheer-leaders, whooping as another dance starts.

Beside me, Mom claps, her camera dangling from her wrist. The sight revives the memory of our night out in Athens two years ago—dinner in the Plaka, the singer in the blue-sequined dress, the electric hurtles of the Greek dancers, and then the one who held his hand out, inviting me to dance. I had revisited the moment a million times in my mind. I thought the dancer’s face would become the marker of this memory, the way dismay spread like an inkblot across his bright expression, but it was his outstretched hand I’ve remembered. The whole incident lasted three seconds, but it’s three seconds I wish I had back.

Costas steps to the side of the dance floor as two of the other men make elaborate leaps, then twist themselves into limbo postures. Standing beside the Mythos beer crates stacked by the bar, he bounces on his heels, drums his fingers against his chest, and blows piercing whistles through his fingers. I focus the video camera on him, the Lord of the Dance.

As the two leaping men take their bows, I notice Letta, the Greek guide who’s traveling with us, applaud, and I remember what she said when we first started out in Crete: “People do not come to Greece to rest. They come to gain their days.”

I’d tried to shield myself from life and inhabit my own small, safe corner. But there is no immunity from life—that’s what I’ve learned. I will never be the kind of person to volunteer from the audience at
Cirque du Soleil
, but I won’t be satisfied being draperies either. I don’t want to miss out on what the Greeks call
zoe
. Life. I want to live all of it, the whole glorious hazard.

Costas walks straight to me, and I see it coming. He holds out his hand.

I set the video camera on the table.

“You want to dance?” he asks.

I’m on my feet.

He pulls me into the center of the room. As we dance, I try to catch a glimpse of his feet, almost bumping into him. I rely on what Demetri taught me three and a half years ago—step, step, step, hop. When he raises our hands above our heads, my fingers accidentally brush against the dark stubble on his face.

The beat of the music accelerates. Costas yells for Trisha to grab on, and she takes my outstretched hand. Soon a long line snakes through the flame-colored columns in a mood of mild pandemonium. My mother is back there somewhere, but I can’t see her. Costas sings along to the music, our hands sweating together, and I feel the heat on my cheeks. On the next pass by the table, I see my video camera still rolling, its red light glowing, capturing me from the waist down as I dance at the center of the world.