Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 12

Twelve

Mount Olympus:

I had been living at Kalogiros’ apartment for several weeks waiting for my Holy Mountain visa when he suggested I visit Mount Olympus since it was also an ancient sacred place also worthy of pilgrimage.

He recommended that the best way to make the pilgrimage was for him to take me on his motorcycle to a climber’s hospice near the summit. This was the highest point which could be reached by road—then I should spend the night at the hospice and continue on foot to the summit very early in the morning to enjoy the dawn.

He himself would spend the night at a monastery he knew about on the lower slope of the mountain since he didn’t feel up to the strenuous climb to the summit, then he would pick me up at the climber’s lodge later in the day.

I had wanted to climb Mount Olympus for a long time. In fact, I had wanted to climb Mount Olympus so much several years earlier while still in America that I drove to the Olympic peninsula of Washington State one vacation and hiked on the slopes of the American Mount Olympus; though I never made it to the top. I never imagined I would ever see the original Mount Olympus in Greece.

But, thanks to “Good Priest”, I did.

Kalogiros took me, riding behind him on his motorcycle, first to see the a partly ruined monastery where he planned to spend the night and then on up to the climber’s hospice near the summit.

That evening, eating a hot meal with the other prospective Olympus climbers, I made friends with a small group of Greek Air Force men who invited me to join them before dawn the next day for an “assault on the summit” as I guess a real climber would call it. I slept well enjoying the cool, thin mountain air and woke with the first pre-dawn movements of the day’s other Olympus climbers.

We hurriedly dressed and followed a clear path for most of the climb but near the summit the path ended at some steep rocks. The air force men showed me dim painted arrows marking the easiest climb up the rocks and then, since they climbed very swiftly, left me to find my way alone.

But soon I joined them and some other early birds at the top to watch the sun rise in magnificence over the seacoast and the lower slope of this “holy mountain”.

Sometimes I think I was just born lucky!

Tomasito, 2009


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Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 11

Eleven

The Greeks Have a Word for it:

When we were talking one afternoon as he repaired some broken cameras, Kalogiros asked: “Is there any one word in English describing a person who has the skills and training and even the medicines to help heal a sick person but who will do nothing for the sufferer unless he is well paid?”

I reviewed of all the dirty words for such a scoundrel I could think of, but couldn’t remember any single word for such a villain so I replied, “No, I don’t think there is such a word in English’.

“We have such a word in Greek” he said—“Doctor”.

Think about it.

Tomasito, 2009


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Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 10

Ten

Good Food and Drink:

Several times each week, Kalogiros rides his motorcycle out of the city to a spring in the mountains where he fills several plastic bottles with pure drinking water.

These expeditions always take place at night when the heat of the day is diminishing. Many times I ride behind him with my hands gripping his shoulders for dear life as he rxpertly navigates the city traffic and then the country roads.

He drinks only this pure spring water and does all his own vegetarian cooking. Though he seems quite healthy, he tells me he had recently spent several months in the hospital as a result of the “no resistance” and other spiritual/physical experiments.

I especially like these night expeditions for water since we would always stop at a shop on the way home which sells that truly divine food, Greek yogurt.

Tomasito, 2009


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Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 9

Tomasito photo, 2009

Nine

“Good Priest", the Greek biker, means it.

When I get back to Thessaloniki, I telephone the biker with the help of a friendly English-speaking gas station attendant who writes out directions for me so I can find his apartment.

I finally locate the apartment, on the sixth floor of one of the hundreds of apartment block buildings crowding the seacoast. My new friend is delighted that I have come and invites me to stay with him until I get my visa—and he says he has friends in the Holy Mountain office, who will help me get the document as soon as possible.

I can sleep on the couch in the living room of his small one-bedroom apartment and he will accept no payment from me—he says he will gain spiritual merit from helping a pilgrim!

His name is Kalogiros, which he says means “good priest”.

Kalogiros is a young man that I would describe as “typically Greek”. He is fairly short and stocky and wears longish black hair, a thick black beard and a mustache. He is muscular with thick workingman’s fingers so I suspect he is a mechanic or construction worker but he turns out to be a certified repairman of expensive foreign cameras—which work he does at home on his small kitchen table.

He plies his trade for several hours every day and while he works we talk. This may seem strange because the only Greek I know is the five words of the Jesus prayer and he speaks very little English, but the simple fact is that we seem to understand each other quite well anyway.

Besides, he has such an unusual way of working that it is really edifying to watch.

First he takes the malfunctioning camera completely apart, scattering tiny bits and screws all over the small table with what seems to be total abandon. As he destroys the camera he will suddenly say: “There is the problem!” but will continue taking the apparatus apart until it is just a heap of pieces.

Then he immediately begins to re-assemble the camera, picking up the tiny screws and joining together the bits of metal and plastic with his thick, sausage-like fingers—until it is perfectly whole and fixed. And perhaps most odd of all, though he has documents pinned to his wall which prove that he is a certified technician, authorized by their factories to repair even the most expensive Haselblad cameras from Germany or Nikons from Japan, he says he never has been trained for this work at all—just always knows instinctively exactly what must be done.

Camera shops all over Thessaloniki bring their broken fine cameras to him to fix and he says that he always has more work than he wants.

After I get to know him better and we have spent several afternoons “talking” in our peculiar way, he demonstrates for me something else he says he has learned to do—and something he said I should never try since acquiring the skill and knowledge had almost cost him his life.

He took two strands of bare copper wire—one in each hand— and stuck them into the open holes of an electric wall socket—taking what should have been a serious or fatal shock in stride—not even blinking or pausing in his conversation. He said that he had learned, through meditation and other occult techniques, to offer no resistance to the flowing electric current, but to allow it to pass freely through his body.

He said that this was the true meaning of the biblical injunction to “resist not evil”.

“If you resist the current (or the evil), you’ll get fried. You have to just let it flow through you without any resistance.”

He explained this to me in Greek and I understood.

While he was elaborating on this dangerous practice, Kalogiros suggested that I read a book called “The Secret of the Golden Flower” when I could locate a copy in English. (A few years later, I found a copy of this opaque book, but never understood enough of it to try this experiment.)

Kalogiros accompanies me to the visa office of the Holy Mountain government when I apply and makes sure that they know I am especially interested in the painting of icons since I am an artist.

He tells me that if you are a foreigner interested in some particular aspect of Greek culture , history or art, there is a better chance of being granted a visa than if you merely want to satisfy touristic curiosity. I am indeed very interested in the icons produced on Holy Mountain–their meaning, use and manufacture.

Tomasito, 2009


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Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 8

Eight

My First Greek Friend:

I have gone a mile or two toward Thessaloniki when I am attracted by a little blue and white Greek-style church beside the road. It has a graded parking lot, which is empty, and there are some dry sand hills behind it where I can probably be alone to cook up some more hedge soup—it’s lunchtime.

During this long pilgrimage I have learned to subsist on hedge soup which is a boiled concoction of edible plants I gather as I ride. Edible plants of all kinds grow along most highways. It’s easy to learn to identify them, they don’t take much cooking, they are tasty, nutritious and, best of all, free!

Well and good.

I have leaned my old bicycle, loaded with saddlebags and bedroll, against a tree at the parking lot and am carrying off my lunch-making gear, when a guy riding a big new touring motorcycle rumbles into the lot, parks his machine beside my bike and disappears into the church.

Bikers can be trouble, so I hastily prepare and eat my lunch in the hills behind the parking lot, then quietly return to my bike and am pushing it out of the parking lot when the biker comes out of the church and calls to me. I stop and wait while he walks over. He speaks a little broken English. He invites me to sit and share his lunch.

Though I just ate some yummy hedge soup, I’m always ready for “real” food and I’m curious too about what kind of a biker would pause at a church, so we sit, eat and “chat” mainly in sign language. The tid-bits he shares with me are those little grape-leaf wrapped Greek morsels that are so delicious. He says he makes them himself.

He asks about my bicycle travels and is curious about my pilgrimage.

He is an Orthodox Christian, of course, (“If you’re Greek, you’re Orthodox., he says.”) and he seems to think it is quite normal that an American should be here making a pilgrimage to Holy Mountain by bicycle.

Why not?

He knows several of the monks on Holy Mountain and knows all about their strict visa requirements.

Do I have any friends in Thessaloniki? He asks. No? Than, he says, he will be my friend. He writes his phone number on a scrap of paper for me, tells me he will see me in a couple of days when I reach the city and roars off.

Tomasito, 2009


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Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 7

SEVEN

My “Pilgrimage Director”

The people in the Holy Mountain office in Thessaloniki told me that it was easier to get a visa in the winter since foreign “pilgrims” usually only want to visit during the pleasant summer vacation months, but I really don’t want to spend two months in Thessaloniki waiting for a visa to visit Holy Mountain so I think I will just keep traveling until late October and then return to Thessaloniki to get the visa.

I am on the seacoast on the east side of the Holy Mountain peninsula and I know that if I keep peddling north, I will reach the Dardanelles strait and Istanbul. I have been through Istanbul before by bus and I didn’t care very much for the crowded, dirty old city—but I think it might be more interesting than Thessaloniki.

But when I try to peddle past the highway marked “to Thessaloniki” my inner ‘Pilgrimage Director’ demands that I turn left and go back to that city. It’s a nuisance and I don’t want to go, but I have learned to heed that “inner voice” which must be partly intuition, partly hunch, partly imagination and partly I don’t know what.

Sometimes when I have not listened, I have regretted it.

Maybe this “Pilgrimage Director” develops slowly as a person pilgrims and maybe it will never be a part of your consciousness—because people are very different, but I try never to argue with it or refuse to be guided by it—it has literally preserved my life in this body more than once—so I don’t argue, I simply turn left and head west.

Tomasito, 2009


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New Boy in Town

New Boy in Town (Tanya photo, 2009)

Hello.

We have stopped traveling, found an apartment, and are now living in Escondido, California--a bit north of San Diego--just a few miles from Mexico.

We are not quite settled in--so will not continue our blogs for a while, but we will continue soon.

Tomasito, 2009

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