50 Blog Post, Saturday, October 26, 2024 “Liquid Glass”
When I got in the water, I kept trying to find the right words to describe it. I could only come up with this—it was like swimming in liquid glass. The water was incredibly clear, and a light aqua. I could see the ripples on the bottom even as my feet rested there. The sun was out, so the clear water just seemed to absorb all that light and carry it along. It wasn’t warm, but it had the light chill that I prefer when I swim. I want the water to be refreshing when I get in. I want it to be just a little bit of a challenge. It was, but just a little, not a lot.
Alistair and I ended up on one of the most beautiful beaches on Naxos as a result of a nearly 8 mile hike around a nearby peninsula. We use an app called All Trails that shows us hikes anywhere in the world where we find ourselves. We set the challenge for our final day to take a longer hike than yesterday, but not one that had the same climb challenge, so there was some coughing but no complaining on my part!! The hike brought us mostly near the coastline, venturing up into the hills for a short while as we crossed the top of the peninsula to see these beautiful beaches on the other side. We would never have known about them if we hadn’t gone on this hike. If you find yourself on Naxon, the beaches are called Agia Anna and Agia Prokopios (nothing is easy in Greek!). Agia is the word for Saint, so they are Saint Anna and Saint Prokopios beaches, and they are close to the city of Naxos, but it would be most useful to have a car to get there. I wouldn’t normally walk 3 or 4 miles each way for a swim. The water was quite calm, unlike some of the wild shorelines that are found around the island, but it got deep quickly, so I stayed closer to shore.
On this huge, perfect crescent of shoreline, we saw only 3 or 4 other people swimming nearby, so we were mostly on our own. I was on my own. Alistair is not a swimmer but he is a very supportive beach sitter! As the weather hasn’t been great, I haven’t been able to swim the way I thought I would, but today was just perfect, and as I spent time in the Aegean Sea, with the sheen and glimmer of the sun dancing off the waves, and all that liquid glass swirling around me. As I dried off and we got ready to complete the rest of the hike, we talked about how different this beach must have looked even a month ago, packed with people, and now, as the season is officially over, the beaches become quiet and empty. My kind of beach!
I told Alistair that today’s swim officially met my sabbatical criteria to perfection. We have done so many different tours and walks and even boat rides, but my goal was to swim on just the kind of beach we were at today. We head to Santorini tomorrow, a smaller but more popular island. We’ve been booked into an extraordinary hotel, from what I see, and I’m not sure we are near the beach because the hotel is high up on the cliff in the village of Oia, but my hope is to swim on Santorini as well. We have heard stories of black sand, red sand and white sand beaches, all a result of the volcanic activity that formed the island.
We also decided to take part in a final activity today that lots of people do—a sunset trip to the Temple of Apollo remnants. This is the first place we have stayed, besides Venice, where we could clearly see the sunset every night, but the Temple hill is special. Taking photos of the portico right at sunset is a classic instagrammable Naxos activity and as the sun set, the hill was swarmed by families, photographers and one young man who sat facing the setting sun in a lotus position and literally never moved the entire time. I get the feeling that the rest of us must have supremely annoyed him by running back and forth to get ‘the perfect picture’. The wind was, once again, absolutely ferocious up on that hill, and while it wasn’t really cold, it was kind of tiring to have to face down the wind the whole time. The sunset was beautiful, not the most beautiful we have seen here, but it was our last sunset on Naxos, so we found it to special, and yes, the pictures are stunning with the juxtaposition of the ancient Temple stones and the gleaming sun. I told Alistair that even though we think of this as such a special experience, both the sun and the Temple portico have been spending the evenings together for over 2400 years.
But today, I need to end with a conversation about…food.
First.the baklava. I know, I know. Isn’t baklava all the same? The answer is no. Baklava hasn’t ever been a temptation for me, to be honest. Until Naxos. The little bakery around the corner, and there are lots of little bakeries around the corner, specializes in a beautiful array of baklava. We found the shop the first night we were here, and the woman in charge was so hospitable. We left with a tiny silver box packed with a few pieces of baklava to have for our dessert. Biting into it, the phyllo layers are perfectly crispy and you can taste all the individual elements that make it so good—butter, honey, nuts of some sort—walnuts or pistachios or almonds, and it has the exact balance of richness and sweetness and texture that made this just exceptional. We had a final stop in the shop tonight—I’m eating baklava for breakfast if I have to—and the woman was once again attentive and welcoming. I’m not sure that one of my goals was to be on a first-name basis with the baklava baker, but there are worse things, right?
Naxos is also known for the more than 30 varieties of cheese that they make here. We had a nutty gruyere-like cheese, and most commonly, they serve a soft cheese on their Greek salads that is mild and delicious. The soft cheese can be mixed with any number of things to flavor it, much like our cottage cheese, but it’s silkier and without curds. We went to a cheese shop, but language barriers made it kind of tough to learn much about the local cheese. But we went ahead and bought a small wedge of the medium sharp cheese, and some olives—oh, just when you’d think I learned my lesson! Yes, we have leftover olives again. Not as many as last time, but we have a good number that will not be traveling with us, and unlike baklava, I am not eating them for breakfast tomorrow.
My one pinch point about tomorrow is that it’s Sunday, and I would really prefer not to travel on a Sunday. I would prefer to do what we normally do—find a local church that we cannot understand and sit and bask in the gathered community of believers. Prayer is a universal language, and I don’t feel as though I need to understand everything to feel connected to God or to the community. I wouldn’t want that experience every Sunday, but I have been able to feel some deep spiritual connections in churches with either English or non-English services as we’ve traveled. I also am not familiar with the Orthodox service and I am not sure that I would be welcome. Plus Alistair tells me that they can last more than 2 hours, and I’m not sure I would want to flounder through a service for that long. Obviously Catholic is the closest, but that’s not commonly available here.
Can we pray on our own? Absolutely. But I have found it beneficial to be with a community. I will always love going to church. I will always respond to liturgy and song. Perhaps tomorrow we’ll find a creative way to share church, a way to nourish our spirits even as our bodies have been nourished by swimming and eating and hiking. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!” (Ps 150:6)
What nourishes you about your faith community, if you have one?
Blessings and grace,
ML+
