AS TODAY COMMEMORATES the restoration of democracy in Greece in 1974, by the element of pure chance I am reading the 14 Characteristics of Fascism by Umberto Eco. They were shared with me on Facebook by my beloved and honoured friend Bernd Brackman. He is a gifted (and also knighted!) pianist.

I read, I understand and my soul suffers.

That’s what sets this contribution off. You should know that. It’s born from pain.

Well, that’s how births go, don’t they?

Compassion is far too clean an expression. Not by itself but the Latin tends to put a veil on what it really means. I like veils, and honour them, but today suffering is better.
It has the rawness of the wound, that being scratched open, being torn apart internally. The rage, the desperation, the pain of injustice, and the numb feeling that violence cannot be the answer to the eternal tragedy of the wars of men and their desperate lust for power. What power does it require to stop?

I feel motherly pain. Where is the power that stops wars?

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes all mothers and their prayers, and schools with teachers, and music, and playgrounds and sports fields.

…and all those men. Like those two beloved and admired I just named before, to raise girls and boys into their full power which is meant to be creative, not destructive, and do something with it.
Not just cheap power display for the boys and ethereal flowers and eye makeup for the girls. It may be amusing, but there is more. It’s called raising.

Let me name real men.

I have a whole portrait gallery of men who raised me. It’s mostly internal. In the previous century they would be framed on the wall of the study. Looking at me, reminding me. Of them, but mainly of myself. These men did not treat me as an object. They raised me. They made me the woman I am.

My dad’s study was his moral sanctuary. He needed it for his daily work of fighting brutality, greed and deception. He was a lawyer and he was decent. He had his seasoned saints around him, many of them lawyers like him, many passed away before him. They were his prayers.

I look the aberrations in the eye. The terrible distortion of the power of men.

And I Refuse.

I refuse to sacrifice the archetypes that shaped and educated me to all those loudly advertised horrible aberrations of it, destroying the face of our Mother Earth.
I won’t do it.
I refuse it.
I will not confuse the angels with the demons.
I will not let go of all my precious men.

However: paternalism is doomed.

The days are over that women stood by, weeping, suffering, silenced, witnessing the ruins of all their care, the forfeiting of the gift of life, the mistaking of brutality for strength.
The days are over that the image of women especially and yes, men alike can be ridiculed, weaponized, politicized, reduced, stereotyped, vilified, trampled upon, desecrated, tortured and killed.

Not everybody gets this of course.
The demon of death frantically dances on trying to blurr the doom of its numbered days.

Proper naming

I am not making any case here about women and men.
I am not stereotyping.
I am just naming distortion—in my own inadequate ways—for what it is: the shameful denial of what truly lies in the human being. Denial by reducing and... by stereotyping.

What should societies do?

Societas: association, companionship. Look it up yourself and let the Latin word give you its word aura. Societies should aim to raise.

Therefore honoring culture, education, love of traditions, marveling at the cultural richness and depth of our ancestries, teaching the proper forms of humility, not the ones that bend to overlords but honor the full potential of our beings, society being the miracle of diversity bringing individuals together and creating what otherwise would be impossible and unattainable.

From honoring diversity, economies blossom. That is not some vague principle.

This is also solid economy. This is what literally feeds us.

Attuning versus noise

And what about your relation with it? Finding your own attitude?
Attuning is required before you make any music. Otherwise it’s just noise.

A certain attention span, and a certain willingness to learn from life and its challenges is helpful.
Without pointing fingers at perceived external villains the moment an issue becomes a challenge and starts calling yourself into presence. Exactly in the place and at the time where you are. Such as you are now.

What is asked? What is needed? What can you do? And can you face your own weaknesses and discover the strength when you just face them?

The base is education. That base is needed before self-education sets in. A non-politicized education. The old respectful trade evoking the soul, the heart and the morality. And then you grow up.

One of these mornings
You’re gonna rise up singing
Then you spread your wings
And you take to the sky

(from “Summertime”, Porgy and Bess, lyrics Edwin DuBose Heyward, music: George Gershwin)

And you are on your own. Your education is never finished.

What you probably need is the basic gear:

A certain attention span,
A willingness to at least try to understand something,
To be interested in something else than your own material interests and those of your clans.
Suppress the urge to blame others.
And when having problems with attention? Don’t fuss. Train it.

Also perhaps a little, just a tiny little wonder about the world we are living in. Not just about the destruction of it. Also a little care for a fragile world with fragile human beings and the other species on it, outnumbering us by far and sustaining us? Life force is the greatest of all, but it always poses as fragility.

Don’t be fooled by that. It’s where we all come from. It’s power.

The disease and the health

Oh yes, this hideous carousel of molded rotting reduced worldviews, those short-term power lusts, all the delusional self-aggrandizing, the self-enriching greed masking shameful inner poverty, the power of lies and cheats, the misuse of force through brutality, spreading death, pain, inflicting wounds and hatred.

The demon. There today and nothing but dust tomorrow. It has no true substance.
Deep inside it is empty and it knows it.

Instead what is power for? Caring, tending, building, educating, serving, helping and healing, protecting, sheltering, discovering, inventing, playing. And loving, despite everything and with all your might.

I am not politicizing. I am not making a case against anyone. Nor am I fortifying the lines I wrote with too many quotes, to make them intellectual. I could do that but I don’t.

I’m not making cases against men.

As for not having polished my lines of thought. Please do the polishing yourself. Please find the quotes. Please think better. Bigger and better.

And if you want to really dismiss and ridicule me? I’ll help you. It’s an easy one.
I’m just an old hag living in Crete, with zero power, two cats, and every morning deciding which dress to put on for today and deciding what to put on the table. Put me away as irrelevant, a fossil, a dumb chick, go ahead.

I do not politicize here. I know other people who are great politicians. It’s not my craft. I do not polarize and reduce.
The only thing I do is remind you. Re-Mind.
And you will know best what to do with it.

Affectionate greetings from Crete on this commemorative summertime day,

Nina Rosewood

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YESTERDAY WAS ONE of those days filled with small chores.

We have visitors coming soon, and whenever guests are on their way you suddenly develop an eye for little things that need attention. It feels a bit like the days before Christmas.

Something else often happens at such times. It is as if the house itself notices the preparations and decides to present a few issues of its own. A thing that suddenly stops working. Something that demands attention right when you are already busy. This time it was particularly amusing.

The front door no longer wanted to close.

Well, technically it closed. It just refused to lock.

This happened shortly after we had a moment of brilliant foresight and mounted a small key safe in an inconspicuous niche in the outside wall, complete with a spare key inside. Guests do occasionally lose keys.

It was almost as if the door had woken up and shouted, “Excuse me!” As in: “Very nice, all those plans involving keys. But I’m still here too. Pay attention to me for a change.”

The fact that the door suddenly refused to lock struck me as rather remarkable.
We spent quite some time on it, wrestling the old screws out. As so often happens with old houses, the repair turned into something like a dental procedure.
“The screws are stripped and bent. They have to come out.”
“What screwdriver would you like, Doctor?” asked the assistant.
“None. This will be an extraction. Let’s remove all four wisdom teeth while we’re at it and be done with the whole business. Agreed, Mrs. Door?”
“Mmmmph. Goooood iddea, Docdor,” replied the patient.
“Excellent. Water-pump pliers and locking pliers, then.”
“The large locking pliers?”
“Yes, those. Thank you. Mrs. Door, open very wide, please. Wider. That’s perfect. This won’t take long. No anesthetic?”
“I’m a door. I don’t feel pain. Carry on.”
Within moments all four screws had been pulled and deposited neatly in the tray.

And then what? Suddenly we were no longer dentists but residents of our own house on Crete.
The reconstruction phase had begun.

Now came the puzzling, adjusting, and improvising. Small metal plates, little shims, bits and pieces inserted here and there—not the lock itself, but the strike plate in the door frame where the lock is supposed to engage.

Nothing worked.

At least, not at first. Then...
I don’t remember who said what exactly, but for some reason I started thinking about house spirits and gnomes. We had acquired some new Torx screws for the strike plate and were still running through possibilities at full speed when, quite suddenly, a feeling of calm arrived.

I heard myself say: “I think this may be something to do with the house spirit. Let me just put these screws in carefully and let’s see what happens.”
This was completely irrational, not to say mildly insane.
I followed my hands, the screws, and a vague intuition, while muttering something about elemental beings. And then?

The door locked smoothly. Problem solved.

“What happened?” Jacqueline asked.

“An elemental spirit,” I said gravely. “Or perhaps the new Torx screws and all the attention we gave it? Either way, it seems to have worked.”
We considered the matter.
“Really, we should leave out a saucer of milk,” I said. “That’s what one does for gnomes in fairy tales. The trouble is that the cats would immediately assume it was for them. Perhaps those two new screws are enough. Not because they’re doing anything special, but because they’re there, and because they’ve replaced the old stripped ones.”

Usually Jacqueline gives me a somewhat skeptical look when I talk like this, even though she is the one who routinely works minor miracles whenever wood is involved.
All right, this was perhaps more metal than wood.
But that wasn’t the point.
It was the feeling of the house gnome, and the decision to follow it.

“I think the gnome—or perhaps the spirit of the door itself—is called Tork,” I announced with some feigned authority. “I think he’s pleased with the screws.”
“Ah. Torx screws. TX,” said Jacqueline.
“Exactly. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t understand it either. But this is simply why his name is Tork.”

Later that day, while we were sitting in the garden, we received another visitor.
In the late afternoon a snake suddenly appeared.
A quick, light-gray snake shot nervously past the legs of the garden table and disappeared in the direction of the street.

Naturally, it needed a name as well. In case it decides to join the little community that has formed around the house, alongside the cats Cathy and Tripity, who simply showed up one day and declared themselves members.

Whether the snake might be dangerous never really occurred to me. Perhaps it had been sleeping in the shade near the outdoor tap and we had disturbed it by sitting down nearby. Perhaps it simply decided it was time to find another spot.

The name is still fluctuating a little, especially the ending, but the beginning is fixed.
At the moment it is Samovila. Σαμοβήλα.

And so this morning I woke up in a house with a door inhabited by a gnome named Tork—or perhaps a door that is itself named Tork—and with household pet, no, garden creature number three:

Samovila.

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