Living Happiness

Hi, everyone, and happy Thursday to you. It is a beautiful day here in Crete: not a cloud in the sky, and the daisies and poppies blooming riotously everywhere you look. I’ve spent the morning by the sea, drinking a freddocino and thinking about you, myself, life and this blog.

We are in the middle of Easter Week now. Tonight is Holy Thursday, and everyone will go to the church to kiss the cross, and the eggs will be dyed a deep, dark red today to signify the blood of Christ. Tomorrow everyone will all descend on the butcher shop to pick up the Easter lamb for Sunday’s feast. We will be there, too, getting our little cut of meat to make a Cypriot lamb with dates. And I am going to try to make tsoureki (a Greek sweet bread made at Easter) for the first time. Since yeast and I don’t seem to get along, I am interested to see how it turns out.

G and I are excited today because we may have found our home for the next few years. It is a lovely place on a high, quiet slope outside of town with a view of Souda Bay and the mountains. There is a big garden and a lemon tree and fig trees and clementines. There’s even a fireplace. We are going back again this evening to discuss where we want the phone jack to be placed in the spare bedroom (which will be my office), and then (assuming all goes well) we will be signing the papers tomorrow. We can’t believe it. And probably won’t believe it until we have contract in hand and deposit paid. It makes me smile.

Over the next few weeks, you may see a lot of changes to this blog as I take my cue from fellow blogger, Graceful Creative, to honor myself and create a blog space that is uniquely mine with its own unique purpose. Which is not to say that this current space isn’t also mine. But I do feel that perhaps I may have jumped the gun a bit and raced to load up my blog before I’d sifted through everything carefully and gotten a real sense of what I want it to be and where I want it to go. Thanks to Graceful Creative for the information she includes on her own website that has inspired me to follow her lead and do not the same thing but something in a kindred spirit.

Thank you to those of you who are stopping by regularly to read this and are offering me your words of encouragement (you can do this in the comments section, too!). I am confident you will enjoy the new reincarnation of this blog, too, as it occurs. So please … stay tuned. And bear with me.

I am also open to suggestions for the new blog space if you have any … ?

Peace to all of you today.

Good morning, everyone. It’s Wednesday morning here in Greece and I am waking up with English Breakfast tea and a willingness to smile.

It has been a rough few days for me this past week, and I have struggled to know what to write here. I have wanted to share some of my sorrows and at the same time have not wanted to.

On the one hand, the past several days have held lovely surprises: a visit from a friend whom I hadn’t seen in three years, outdoor coffees, dinners under the stars, blessed time together with new and old acquaintances. On the other hand, I have also lost a friend … well, a friendship, really. And in a very painful way. And for reasons still unknown to me.

So while at times I am laughing and smiling and enjoying just the beauty of being alive on a glorious Spring day, there have been plenty of other times where I have found only the energy to sit, contemplate, and generally feel sad and blue.

My life in Greece is not (and has not been) an easy one. And I don’t think some of my State-side friends always realize that. Most days here have been a struggle for me: to communicate, to work, to socialize, to do many of the things we take for granted when we are in our own country. And while it is true that some of these difficulties will ease up a bit at the end of the summer (after I’ve returned here from a whirlwind trip back to visit), there are still a lot of days where I simply have no internal reserves of strength or energy left and feel that my world has become very small and, though beautiful, resembles a gilded cage.

I don’t know sometimes what is true. Does the smile on my face, even when I am sad, really serve to help me feel better? Does this “positive attitude” I try to adopt really help change my circumstances, change me? Or am I guilty of just putting on a mask, being deceitful, hiding what I really feel? Am I deceiving myself? What’s really going on?

I don’t know.