The Spiral Staircase

Today is April 24. We are on the airplane about to depart from Cologne Germany to Heraklion, Crete, Greece. 

I write this very aware that I will probably be unable to post it at least until our return. I have been blocked from my Google account (my blog is on the Google platform) and despite diligent efforts and research I will probably be unable to access it until I get home and try to sign in from a familiar computer. I may have permanently lost access to my email and my blogs. (This is sad but of course the troubles others face in our troubled world put my hardships - however difficult for me - into perspective. )

I lost my iPhone on the bus ride from Ekenas Finland to the next town where we were to catch the train. We searched the bus thoroughly and repeatedly and it was not to be found. I noticed it missing just before Cookie and I took a farewell selfie at my request. 

We missed our train and took a costly taxi to the airport in Helsinki. Most of the time since then I have been anxious and obsessed with efforts and obstacles involved in replacing the lost iPhone. 

On the other hand, the trip from Helsinki by plane to Frankfurt, then train to Cologne, was an interesting opportunity to experience myself without my iPhone. I missed knowing that it was counting my every foot step (this reminded me of a biblical quote about God counting every feather of the sparrow, or something like that, to illustrate how closely God watches over us). I thought the iPhone was like a little god watching over me, counting my every step, and that I felt almost like I was missing a part of myself. I had no camera, no email, no texting, no books to read, no way to write or post blogs, no way to play Wordle, practice a language on Duolingo (I had stopped doing Irish and was doing Greek), no way to visit Facebook, no way to search the Internet, no way to review the emails with the facts about our future trip. I was stripped of much of what I thought of as me. I decided to treat it as if it were a Buddhist retreat. Since I couldn’t read or write or entertain myself, I simply settled in - to be as attentive as possible to my surroundings and my experience. 

This led to a (for me) amazing experience. When I boarded the train I found I had been assigned a seat in an area with two seats facing each other on each side of the aisle. This little group of eight seats contained me and two families: a woman with a little girl 5 or 6 years old (in the two seats directly opposite me) and a couple with a little boy 10 months or so, and a little girl 2 or 3 years old (in the seats across the aisle). As we settled down and the train started, the baby boy was howling. The young mother sitting in front of me reached across the aisle to give Baby Boy a tiny toy dinosaur. He quieted down and his mother looked at the other mother with grateful relief. I noticed Baby Boy’s sister watching the older little girl. The younger girl was spellbound, and I was not surprised to find - after going to the toilet - that she had moved into my seat to get closer to this fascinating creature. I welcomed her and made room on the empty seat beside me (directly across from the bigger girl), acknowledging that of course she wanted to be close to this other girl. Both girls gazed into my eyes and I was moved by their openness. The older girl kept pulling her mask down and glancing at her mother who kept finding gentle and playful ways to pull the mask back on. “it’s a hard time to be a mother” I said to the mother. I don’t know if she understood my English but I am certain she at least received the respect and appreciation in my tone of voice. Then I looked at her daughter and said “it’s a hard time to be a kid too.“ I do not think that this young girl understood my English, but her frank gaze communicated that she picked up quite clearly on my respect. She began to play with a tiny stuffed walrus, finding little openings and special places on the train seats for it to swim in loops and circles. I watched her creative play, as spellbound as the little girl. 

When we were getting off the train this girl stood beside me and quietly allowed her walrus to rub his head and body tenderly against my hand (just the way an affectionate cat or dog might rub). I responded by stroking the little walrus, and rubbing him gently behind his ears. I felt such intimacy and affection in this completely nonverbal communion between me and this little girl and her walrus. I was struck that this magical moment of meeting (it reminded me of the I-thou moments that Martin Buber writes about) would not have happened without both my immersion in Cookie Monster’s life (which truly does resemble his metaphor of a frenzied shark hunting and feeding on magical moments of observing beauty and joy in children, dancers, actors - and “catching” those moments on camera) and my lost iPhone marooning me in a world where there was nothing left to do but to pay attention. I thought at the time and I still think that moment with the little girl and her walrus - that moment alone - was worth all the hassle (past and future) over the lost iPhone and all the exhaustion trying to keep up with Cookie’s pace and the intensity of the stimulation when I was with him. Kind of like the Hebrew prayer “Dayenu” - it would have been enough. Lord, if all you had given me in this life had been that moment with the little girl and her walrus, dayenu. It would have been enough. 

I arrived in Cologne and immediately found Agnes who held up a large white envelope (it had no name on it but it caught my eye and when I looked down at the person holding it I recognized Agnes). We stopped to take Covid tests on the way home. Covid tests are available free in Germany and people take them a lot. It was very different from Cookie who with all his life-long serious health issues refuses to take anything seriously (certainly not Covid). He jokes about being immortal, about deciding as an infant in isolation and never being held (no one can believe he survived that, let alone his other health challenges that were expected to end his life as an infant, as a teenager, and many times over before he reached his present age of 77) that if he could survive this he could survive anything. 

Agnes and Sabine our German friends have significant immune challenges and need to avoid Covid. So Chris’s testing positive created a need to isolate and test and retest, a radical change from Cookie’s (and I think Finland’s in general) more casual attitude. It was a culture shock for me. I tested negative but Chris’s result from this (and from her most recent previous test - she had tested a total of 7 times in the week she had been there) did not come through. So, at meals, Chris and I sat at one end of the long dining room table (with Agnes and Sabine at the other end), and I served her so food that she would not handle the serving utensils. 

Among the real high points of the Cologne visit for me were walks in the many green areas of the city. We also walked back and forth to an apple store about a mile and a half away multiple times as I tried to find out whether T-mobile (whose customer service on US time didn’t open until afternoon) would be able to activate a iPhone bought in Germany), whether my apple care plus covered loss and theft (it did not). All was complicated by the time zone difference and by lost passwords and lost info on the lost phone (like serial number). In the end I was able to buy a new phone, activate it through T-mobile US, and even recover some contacts and passwords from iCloud (even though I thought I had deleted my contacts from iCloud after problems with disappearing contacts that seemed related to iCloud and gmail interactions and that I had been unable to fix. )

Here’s a photo of an upside down ice cream cone on that walk we took so many times. 

And here is the spiral staircase inside the apple store - my first photo with my new iPhone 13 mini. 

Another high point was a concert in Cologne philharmonic concert hall, by a youth orchestra with a professional violinist leading. The youthful performers (and audience), the obvious love of music shared among all of us, the superb playing and the coordination and cooperation (even their tuning was done in a musically pleasing way), and the use of the lead violinist’s body in graceful dancerly movement as she played (and also the violins in the orchestra, so they bent over and lifted their violins together, and a wave seemed to ripple through with a beautiful sense of their dancing to the music and with one another as they played). I learned some years ago from a seminar by a member of the Miro Quartet that I can remember and be more aware of musical themes if I find words and phrases to fit to them. In the first Beethoven piece, my words for different movements were something like “Let’s go out and play together” “Tomorrow we can go outside” “Hurray! We can go out and play today!” The music became a celebration of the post-Covid (or mid-Covid interlude) of freedom to travel and mingle and play - including to be present at that particular concert. The second piece by Berlioz I used the same phrase for all the very different movements: “Let us see what love can do.” This made the music a celebration (and embodiment) of our human ability to create beauty and harmony together - a wonderful respite from a world racing headlong into disasters of climate and war, of neglect and avoidance and hatred. ) Agnes who is a passionate swimmer said as we walked into the concert hall that she couldn’t wait to “dive into” the music. I was struck by her (as it turned out, unconscious) metaphor - that music is something that holds me, in which I can float and move freely and gracefully and fluidly, and in many ways is like swimming in water. I also was very tired and at times dozed a little and felt like a baby being rocked in the music. By the end of the concert I felt showered and washed with beauty, inside and out, and profoundly refreshed. 

After the concert we went out for a drink in the cafe above the concert hall with Annmarie and her foster daughter Christiana (who had joined us for the concert). The concert was a long-delayed birthday present (celebrating her birthday last August) from Sabine to Annnmarie and Annmarie took us all out for drinks. Everyone spoke English to accommodate me but once in awhile they slipped into German. I noticed when they spoke German I became more nonverbally attuned to them (just as I noticed I had been with the children at the Steiner school in Finland when they spoke Finnish or Swedish) - they seemed more relaxed and happy in their own language and their where frequent bursts of laughter. I noticed how much I enjoyed the laughter and laughed along with them without any need to know the verbal content. I too was more relaxed and happy when they spoke German. I have wondered for years how I could bring the quality of presence I experienced hiking the PCT to my interactions with humans. It seems as if I switch to verbal mode as soon as I am with people, and lose the qualities of presence and attunement that bring me happiness. So being around people who speak a different language gives me a premonition of how it would feel to bring those qualities to my interactions with people. 

A thought - that my iPhone and my verbal self have a lot in common. Both of them give me a reassuring sense of a presence that walks with me that “counts my footsteps” - pays attention, measures, creates a verbal story of who I am. Both in a sense correspond to the part of the self Freud calls the “Ich” (that his English translators mangled with the word “Ego”). But the experience of authentic presence and connection to my senses and the world around me and others - much like Freud’s “das id” (the “that” where in German “that” is used to refer to a child) - is almost immiscible with this. So there is a glory and a freedom in being deprived of my language-yielding self (my “I”-phone). 

Our flight is starting to descend. We will be in Crete in a half hour or so. Thank you for your imagined presence - even though I will most likely be unable to post this until we return home (if ever). Still your presence helps me to suspend a fine thread of connection between the part of me that knows how to be present and the part that loves to use language and make stories. And I hope also this thread helps to connect those parts of you - and, perhaps best of all, that it helps to connect you and me. 

Another highlight of being with Sabine and Agnes was their cooking. They made wonderfully interesting and delicious meals - like the last night with an endive, roast beet, and goat cheese salad 

and a spaghetti with fish. When Sabine was serving the spaghetti I thought of the puppet show at the Steiner school - the two puppets eating the white yarn/spaghetti and throwing it at each other and getting tangled up in it. 

Sabine joked about the erotic side of food (she is a sensualist and a flirt and that definitely adds to the delight of the cooking). Here are the two culinary artists with an erotic flair. 

Our last night we went through photographs and albums and reminisced about our relationship. Chris met Sabine in 1982 -just before Chris and I started to date - and they had a strong connection that might well have become a marriage if they were not deeply committed to their lives on different continents. Here’s a picture of them that summer they first met.

Chris met Agnes around 1992 (when the three of them visited places from Chris’s early childhood that had been on the other side of the “iron curtain” until then). I met Sabine sometime in the 1980s when Chris was teaching at a Jung Institute near Zurich (in a particularly gray and rainy May) and Sabine came and drove us over the mountains to Lugano and sunshine. In the intervening years they visited us in Del Mar and Orcas (the summer my niece Angel was with us) and in Naples Florida and on Orcas. We visited them several times in Cologne (including the year we took our granddaughters to Europe), met them in twice in Spain (Barcelona and Bilbao)in the south of France, in Greece, in Paris, in Venice, in Italy in the Dolomites, in Berlin - we really have gotten every year or two and it is an amazing accomplishment for an intercontinental friendship. It was great fun to look at photos (and see how young we used to be!), share stories, try to remember what happened when, and celebrate our friendship especially after a good bit also strenuous and stressful visit (with positive Covid test, their health challenges, my lost iPhone, etc). Here are the four of us together now

…and now it is bedtime on Sunday April 24 which turns out to be Easter here in Greece. We have settled into our little apartment - which had been modernized and renovated since we were last here in ways we really like. Here’s the view out our window. 

And here’s the beach just beyond our apartment. 

We both feel very relaxed - having the feeling of nothing we need to do - just enjoy ourselves. There are not many people here yet and many of the tavernas won’t open until May 1 but there are certainly enough. Tonight we shared moussaka and stuffed tomatoes with yogurt (and a bottle of Mythos beer) sitting in a little outdoor dining area just at the cliff edge above the water so that we ate to the sound of waves. 

So it’s way past my bedtime. I am astonished after so many failed attempts to sign into Google that I was able to sign into blogger and so should be able to upload this after all. Thank you again and hope to share our beautiful walks in this soothing and comforting place with you.