Leros, Day 1 – Here I Am

I am here. I am here in Leros, and it all feels very strange.

I arrived yesterday afternoon, a Saturday, and all feels well. It’s exciting, it’s moving, it feels profound, and I feel also, in that moment, a certain numbness. I feel capable and independent, yet alongside it is a fear, something hidden behind the numbness that is also there.

Curious really. The ability to have so many feelings running parallel, complimentary to and opposing to each other.

How can I feel that profoundness, and the sense of a holding of the breath moment, and numbness all at once? Yet, thank goodness, I can, and it allows me through, it allows me to move forward.

I find the teeny car rental office down a side street, one small room, with one man running it. He is busy finishing dealing with a previous customer. He smiles, asks me to wait, hands me a bottle of water, and I enjoy the peace and calm of the moment.

After a very relaxed transaction, during which I take in very little about the Agia Marina parking problems he is telling me about, I get my car, and head off, no idea of where I am going, grateful for the vagaries of Google maps.

After missing a few turns down very small roads, I find the place I am staying easy enough. It is peaceful, quiet and clean. I am shown to my room which has a balcony overlooking the sea. I drop my bags and head down to the small pool bar to get a bit of lunch – Greek salad and French fries.

All is perfect, yet a sense of unease begins to flow from within me. I head back up to my room to call Dorothy, and we have a lovely chat. She lets me share how wobbly I am beginning  to feel, and it is a great comfort.

After the call I resolve to head out and explore a little, go to the supermarket down the road, walk over to Panteli. However, waves of anxiety begin to flow through me, and I cannot think, I cannot decide how to move. I finally phone Dorothy again. Her listening, her validation, her understanding and love, help me to accept all the more what is flowing through me.

So, I decide to allow whatever it is I am feeling, simply to be what it is I am feeling, no judgement, no analysing; even though it is uncomfortable, I am able to cease resisting it.

I then get myself into the car and drive. Slowly and carefully, and hey presto I find the supermarket. It is small but large enough to be comforting. Entering the supermarket I cannot even begin to think, the power of the tension within me is too strong. I decide simply to walk around; to have found the place is good enough for now. This then allows me to pick up some milk, some bananas, a couple of apples, some water, and a beer. Anything other than that was beyond my capabilities of rational thought at that moment. I headed back to the car and drove back to what was now beginning to feel like the sanctity of home, and made myself a celebratory cup of Barry’s tea.

I am now simply feeling the energy of what is flowing through me, still uncomfortable, but less gripped by my mind. The old conundrum, of how to be aware of but not caught by what we are feeling.

I decide I will walk toward Panteli, and see how I do. On the way I pass a restaurant that was pointed out to me when I was being show my room. It seemed so far away then. It took a 10 minute amble. It was lovely, so I booked a table for the evening.

I continued up the hill on the road toward Panteli where I stopped and chatted with an English couple who knew their way around. After this chance meeting, I had a sense that I was in a lovely place, with nowhere more than a pleasant amble away, and all very quiet and serene.

I let them wander off up ahead of me, and after a bit, kept on up to the top of the hill where a Taverna sits overlooking the sea. Feeling more at ease, I then chose to head home.

I arrived back at my room feeling much calmer. I now had a sense of where I am, and how I would probably go about things during my stay, which, I hoped, would be to go with the unfolding.

My dinner out that evening was lovely.

They’d been a little rain on the walk up, and as I sat and looked out to sea, a magnificent, perfect rainbow arched its way from peninsula to peninsula of the bay. It stayed for a good fifteen minutes, getting brighter and stronger the whole time, until finally fading into the evening.

It was a greeting.

After dinner I wandered back and had a great night’s sleep.

I am settling now, and yet I still feel that energy just below the surface. It feels old, at least the roots of it do, and I welcome it.

My doubts have fallen away now, and I am very happy that I am here.

It is so peaceful, and it is so hard to imagine that my father was here 83 years ago, and it would have been far from peaceful then. What was he feeling?

He’d just been through the liberation Kastellorizo, operations in Kos, and then landed in Leros in a last desperate attempt to keep it from the Nazis. Maybe some of the tension and fear he must have felt have found their way down to me.

I don’t know, but I do know that what I felt yesterday was real, as real and as strong as anything I can feel.

I welcome what I feel, and I welcome what it is here to teach me.

I am here to find my father in what ever way that is meant, and in whatever way it is that he chooses to show himself to me.