Love shook my heart like wind

Love shook my heart like wind
on a mountain punishing oak trees
-Sappho

Joy is small. When the whole world is raging and out of control, joy sneaks quietly in on the back of a kitten climbing the window screen at 4am or in the fragrance of an unexpected rosemary bush on the way home. The other day, joy found it's way into my hand in the form of a tiny orange scrap of construction paper, a worthless item by all accounts, but a gift that held the worth and generosity of a laughing little girl. Will I now be carrying around a small piece of orange paper? Perhaps for a while.

Joy is in the quick flash of a dimpled smile from a little boy so newly safe. Joy is a child fast asleep on the floor as the others sing and dance like banshees all around. Joy is a child's pride at coloring in the lines or singing all the words to a Shakira song. Joy is in the hands of a pudgy toddler attempting to play my ukulele while holding a hard boiled egg.

Joy is in a small man with grey dreadlocks who quickly and competently dives in to stop a fight, yet later brushes all aside with a quiet smile. Joy is the process of trying to untangle the tiny yet surprisingly unyielding row of braids that a pair of giggling girls wove throughout my hair. Joy is in a bag of dried chickpeas, even if they are an admission that the sweet man who gifted them, really just doesn't know how to cook dried chickpeas. 

Joy is in the embrace of a thin woman with a short afro and graceful hands. Joy is in her inward soft smile as she sings with me and the others. Joy crinkles at the corners of her eyes. In my many years of being a musician, I have never met anyone who found such joy at simply singing a song.   Her gift of joy to me is greater than anything I have to give her.

The world rages, but.. well..  there is joy.

In Time of Storm

Brightness

and with good luck

we will reach the harbor 

and black earth

We sailors have no will 

in big blasts of wind,

hoping for dry land

and to sail 

our cargo 

floating about

many

labors

until dry land

-Sappho

A woman's fragmented words echo across two and half millennia, words which remain unanswered and yet answered in countless incarnations shouted and whispered back to her through time.  She is a gift to us, this Sappho, the first voice of a strong woman elbowing her words between those of Plato and Aristotle. And despite a separation of over 2500 years, her words still accurately paint Lesvos and the world today. 

Rumored home of Orpheus' lyre (and his head...) The island of Lesvos has served as a stepping stone between eastern and western culture as far back as the Iron Age. From the shores of it's capital, Mytilene, the not so distant purple mountains of Turkey reflect the light of a setting sun. Tucked into the crook of Turkey's arm, this small island of sturdy people with golden skin and weathered lines, has been alternately Priam, Roman, Macedonian, Byzantine, Genoese, Ottoman and finally in 1912, Greek. (though many would argue that Lesvos has ALWAYS been Greek...) 

In 1922, at the height of the brutal Greco-Turkish war, the city of Smyrna (present day Izmir) was taken by the Turks. Ethnic Greeks and Armenians fled with only their lives, piling into boats, crossing the four mile Mytilene strait and pouring themselves onto the shores of Lesvos. Nearly a hundred years later, over half of the islands 86,000 inhabitants are said to be the the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those desperate refugees. The Asia Minor Mother, a statue of a mother sheltering three children, stands guard on the shores of Mytilene, her back to the sea and her seeking eyes looking to her new uncertain future.



Despite the Greek debt crisis and a crippling depression, the residents of Lesvos stand on the front line of a nearly unprecedented humanitarian crisis. As large swathes of Africa and the Middle East erupt into turmoil, hundreds of thousands of refugees have paid traffickers and stumbled into over crowded questionable boats. For the many citizens and new arrivals, this tiny island of olive trees and ouzo has come to conversely represent safety, shelter, purgatory, prison, familiar and foreign. But despite all, there are still open arms on the beaches, arms that pull the troubled out of the water and into their hearts.