OLIVENESS (Season of the Olive picking)

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...

Ides Of September (Eressos land, 2013)

I can't exactly say why I wrote this title for the post, paraphrasing the Ides of March. Here's what I read in Wikipedia: "The Ides of March (Latin: Idus Martii or Idus Martiae) is a day on the Roman calendar that corresponds to 15 March. It was marked by several religious observances, and became notorious as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. The death of Caesar made the Ides of March a turning point in Roman history, as one of the events that marked the transition from the historical period known as the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. Although March (Martius) was the third month of the Julian calendar, in the oldest Roman calendar it was the first month of the year. The holidays observed by the Romans from the first through the Ides often reflect their origin as new year celebrations." And in National Geographic: "Until that day Julius Caesar ruled Rome. The traditional Republican government had been supplanted by a temporary dictatorship, one that Caesar very much wished to make permanent...They [the assassins] were not able to bring back the Republic, and really what they did was usher in more of a permanent dictatorship under the future Roman emperors—the opposite of what they intended."

Shakespeare, with his Julius Caesar tragedy, made the expression "the Ides of March" to signify a fateful day. Here is the relevant passage: Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue shriller than all the music Cry "Caesar!" Speak, Caesar is turn'd to hear. Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March. Caesar: What man is that? Brutus: A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March. Julius Caesar Act 1, scene 2, 15-19

Of course for me , my acquaintance with the expression was through listening to the legendary American band from the 60's-70's, Ides of March and their amazing tune "Vehicle". In this way I had a completely different idea about the meaning of the expression in my mind. And I will not try to give a definition of what the Ides of September means, let your imagination makes its own. I'll just say that I brought the vehicle that I call my body to Eressos and Osho Afroz meditation center, one September for the first time. I experienced something totally new in my life. It wasn't the friends I made, the sense of family. These sre found in other places too. It was something invisible, intangible, something like freedom, by feeling gratitude for the vehicle while not identifying with it anymore. I guess it's what we call awareness. I spent the whole month there and finally I had to return to the city. From the first moment I stepped into it I realized I need to beware, since my hearth felt wide open while people around me were carrying their armours and weapons. And I kept on moving, watching how my mind while fighting in trying to bring "democracy" brings more "dictatorship" and I kept coming back every year to Eressos and the Buddha field.

Experiencing cool and happy experiences, difficult and hard experiences, all wonderfull and significant in the path to know thou self, diving deep, taking it easy, each time feeling like a new era, a new year. In September of 2013, when these photos are taken, I "descended" into the "underworld" of the Darkness Meditation, in total darkness, to surface changed on the wonderfull nudist beach of Eressos, feeling "nothing to do, nowhere to go", nothing to accomplish, just being -as I hope these photos show. And this year I stayed again the whole September, seeing myself, being again in this family feeling, which is always there but more prominent when the noise of July and August fades out, realizing that the place of sadness that this month used to bare for me because of the end of summer, is now taken by the joy of a full experience lived and a new beginning, like a new year, coming.

So I wrote a lot, when i could let my pictures speak. I hope that all these connections (from Julius to William, to a hippie band and to Eressos outter space land)make sense, or even better, that it doesn't! Just, for you people that are allready feeling yourselves coming to Osho Afroz next season, consider also coming in "out of season", like September. Shakespeare spoke, me spoke, the last word is of...: "All alternatives are open. Choose to be blissful" Osho.