LifeItself

I meant to write on the subject of chaos for a while, because the roof is caving in on our burning global house made of cards, dead bodies, and withered land and plants. The Oxford dictionary defines chaos as Complete disorder and confusion.  The property of a complex system whose behavior is so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions. In my favorite  Greek mythology , the only religion that puts a smile on my face, Chaos was the origin of everything and the very first something that ever existed. It was a primordial void, from which everything was created, including the Universe and the Greek Gods. In ancient Greek, Chaos is translated as ‘the gaping void.’ The first deities that emerged from Chaos were Gaea or Gaia (Life), Tartarus (the Underworld) and Eros (Procreation). Later Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (Night) also emerged. Gaia, the eternal Mother Goddess, emerged first from Chaos and gave birth to the Earth and the Uni...

We are on the island of Sicily, near Syracuse, one of the five Corinthian colonies that also included the island of Ortygia nearby. Old people still remember that Leto gave birth on Ortygia to Artemis, the first of her twin god children with Zeus. Leto was a daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe. She was an early and favorite lover of Zeus. Soon after birth, Artemis helped Leto flee Hera's wrath and escape to Delos, where the other twin, Apollo, was born. Or was it the same island, because in ancient times Ortygia was also called Delos?  Who knows ? The fearless warrior and archer, Artemis, is my favorite goddess of nature and hunting. She protects all plants and animals. She is also an eternal virgin, and the goddess of the moon. This is her statue from Pompeii.  Photo by T. W. Patzek, 01/06/2017. Arethusa means "the waterer." She was a gorgeous nymph, who left her home in Arcadia beneath the sea and became A victim of the river god’s lust She’d tried to flee;...

We are in the western part of Turkish Anatolia, which in Greek means "East" or "Sunrise."  Suddenly, we are inside of many of the oldest human stories that are particularly dear to my heart. The ancient city of Troy is here.  Around 1300 B.C., when Troy was almost 4000 years old, the mother of all Greek wars was fought there, and immortalized by Homer five centuries later in probably the most important oral stories and later texts ever conceived by rational men: The Iliad and Odyssey.  Some of the Greek Gods were born here, many other dueled with one another for power and revenge, or gave birth to the heroes and heroines who determined fate of Troy and future of mankind. My favorite scary goddess, Nemesis, who is reputed to have been conceived by the primordial Goddess of Night, Nyx, played a pivotal role in the fate of Troy. Her name was derived from the Greek words nemêsis and nemô, meaning "dispenser of dues." This full size statue of beautiful Nem...