Where there's a Goddess there's a way

WHERE THERE'S A GODDESS, THERE'S A WAY

This is my catch phrase from my last dream of last night. In the dream:

I am on a road that becomes impassable, thanks to erosion and then construction that has left a gaping L-shaped hole (actually more like the Greek letter lambda)  through which I can see water below. Now fully lucid, I consider my options. I can fly over the obstruction, as I have done in dreams before. But that does not feel right.
    Whatever is going on here needs to be sorted out on the ground - or on the water. Different dream lands have different physics and requirements. It seems I am stopped on a bridge. Why not call up a boat to take me where I want to go? 
    Now I hear a tremendous feminine voice, saying, I will open the road from Halicarnassus to Sinope. 
   I sit up in bed with the words vibrating in my mind I am certain I have heard the words of a goddess, delivered by a priestess of her oracle. I am thrilled with excitement.
    Of course my dream has set me yet another research assignment, starting at the birth city of Herodotus, whose Histories were already in my current reading because of a dream from a few days ago, extending to a Black Sea port associated with the quest of the Golden Fleece. No doubt I will be called again into the realm of the Great Goddess of Anatolia....


Image: The Cyblele fountain in Madrid. Though it's at the other end of the Mediterranean, and was sculpted in the 18th century, this is one of my favorite images of the Great Goddess of Anatolia, Matar Kubileya to the Phrygians, Kumbaba to the Hittites, Kybele to the Greeks (syncretized with Artemis at Ephesus), Magna Mater or Cybele to the Romans, and often, quite simply, the Mountain Mother or Mother of the Gods.

One calamity is better than a thousand counsels

Bir müsibet bin nasihatten iyidir. “One calamity is better than a thousand counsels". I learned this Turkish proverb during my recent travels in Anatolia. It seems to me to be an excellent maxim for life, and one that has personal bite, in the context of some of my recent adventures and misadventures, the full recounting of which I'll reserve for a future book.
     We derive the English word "calamity" from the Latin calamitas, meaning "damage, loss, failure, disaster, adversity, misfortune." 
     The Turkish proverb has double meaning. Faced with a calamity, we are out of the realm of words and abstract concepts, down in the chop and rawness of physical events. Even as we struggle to get through the crisis, what life is throwing at us requires us to think about how we need to act and behave in order not to get ourselves into a similar situation, or to get around it if it is brought upon us by others.
     Again, in the face of real calamity, ordinary time stops and ordinary calculations fly out the window. We may need to move at light speed, or alternatively, be content to subsist for a while in a state of suspended animation. We can't go by the clock or the book, the way we did before. This can give a curious and salutary sense of permission even when we suspect we are being punished: permission to stand outside and above the regular round of appointments and duties and requirements.
    It's been said that illness is the Western form of meditation. Calamity may be a universal gateway to transformation, if we are able to recognize the educational opportunity, seize it, and break through rather than break down.

Photo: Getting a little too close to Medusa in Anatolia