You have seen it all around the place. You may have noticed it, if you've slept under it, made love, meditated, enjoyed it's shadow and the beautiful rest of it's dreamy aura.
For us Mediterraneans olive trees were always here. So maybe I haven't experienced the moment of epiphany when I see it for the first time but I have experienced my attention been captured by it. Travelling or walking around the landscape, finding myself looking not at trunks and branches but at sculptures of different shorts. Is it just the mind trying to create a meaning and a form out of shapes that seem to come from a dreamworld- a woman who cries, a dancer fully in his dance, a granma telling fairytales-or the tree is telling a story?
One as biological generators and transformers of the earth's ingredients and sun's warmth into the Gold, the oil, the basis of mediterranean diet and the good health of its people. It's the narrative as a symbol of peace and of victory from the ancient Olympics to the modern world and everything in between, like the culture that has been unfolding around it, the mentality, customs, biology, the wrinkles in the faces of people living by it, all that grew up in human history along with the growing of the tree.
Looking around Greece's harsh landscapes, at olive trees climbing up steep hills, you must have wondered how on earth were these people of times with no cars and machines were able to manage. Take a look at very old photos of people of that era, notice how, slightly, their phisiology is defferent than ours. This difference is what these people were eating, how they were moving about their lives, what was their perception about the world. The olive tree with it's strangely shaped trunk wwas shaping the world. In Greece use to say about those times: “people survived on bread and olives”.
Yes, it's olive picking season in Afroz and Greece. We're so lucky that we have not only peaceful and wellcoming safe Buddha field but also one that keeps connecting with the cycles of the earth. I photographed Swaha in September, early picking some olives to prepare them for the table- because last year's pick was consumed out before the end of the visitor's season. He didn't want me to photograph his face at that moment but that's ok, we don't want to scare people off! And anyway, every olive tree has identity just to let it go when each olive drop is getting crushed by the stones losing her ego in an ocean of oil. In the same way, the hands that pick the olives don't need to have a face, just the wrinkles of experiencing.
So, you lucky people who have decided to join us in Afroz for the olive picking, rejoice! And those of you that are thinking about it, prepare your suitcases, or your spirits for the next season.
In anyway, to talk about the rest of the photos also, September, Octobre, November is a wonderful time to come to Lesvos and Afroz. You really feel the noise of summer withering away into silence. It can even feel like when one thinks so much about something, struggling to find an answer that is hiding the harder the trying. And then one gives up just to suddenly find it effortlesly. This is how I felt after doing so much process in Afroz for the whole summer, feelling that things inside mw were so stirred up and then one morning I go out of my hut and find myself in the middle of silence, looking up into a crystal blue sky with clouds dancing in slow motion their way to emptyness and everything feeling so much in place and time...
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