The Man of Ice, and Hoping for A More Beautiful Spring

It’s 2:30 am. I’m sitting in dark silence, in a lazy boy chair in my living room. No moon; the windows black. About ten feet in front of me, a nightlight reveals a door leading off into unending darkness. The light only makes the night darker.

 

Night focuses attention and surprisingly reveals more than it hides. It releases into the theatre of my mind a whole history of the forgotten that is waiting in the wings to be seen again. The room around me, the chair I sit in, the plants by the window, the book I was reading before I fell asleep, all take on new meaning. The immediacy of my mind, the reality of my life right then, is startlingly clear.

 

I had had a dream. I was on a beach near a body of water. It seemed at first to be a river, a big one, then as an inlet to the ocean. It was morning. I was maybe in my 30s. 6 or 8 young people, unknown to my waking self but not to my dream persona, were there with me. The weather was warm. I ran into the water. But when I started swimming, I noticed the wind waking up and the sky turning gray. I quickly left the water, to get a better view of the sky and weather, and then to warn the other people. Unbelievably, it looked like the air would soon turn to ice; and freezing temperatures, winter was coming. Now.

 

One man would not leave the water. I ran back to the river to reason with him. He said he didn’t care about winter; didn’t care if the water turned to ice. He wanted to turn to ice himself. I left him in the water; it continued to get colder. The man was growing indistinct, as was the sky and the water and everything. Everything was becoming gray, foggy, wintry. The people and place were indecipherable.

 

Why did the man want to turn into ice? Did he dread feeling anything, or feeling emotion more than cold? Feeling his world threatened more than his humanity lost? There’s awareness and there’s denial. There’s night and there’s winter.

 

Like our situation today. Ever since DT, winter has taken on even more emotion and depth. He’s affected the deepest levels of our personal and national psyches. Maybe that’s part of the meaning of the dream. Like ancient people who didn’t understand the science of seasons and might’ve questioned if spring would ever come again, we might do the same. Unlike the man of ice, we today might detest or fear winter, at least the winter of DT. We might fear that spring, a future where our rights and freedoms are protected, might not come again in our lifetime. And we’d have to live in a frozen world.

 

But maybe the winter won’t be quite as cold as it was shaping up to be a few months ago. DT is finally getting resistance not only from “we the people” but from the GOP. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a strong MAGA adherent, now speaks against him. And as columnist Scott Dworkin reports, as of this writing, there have so far been 3 days in a row of protests at the Lincoln Memorial in our capital, 3 days of thousands calling for the impeachment of DT. This news unfortunately didn’t appear in many major press reports.

 

 

And until I heard a program recently on NPR’s Throughline, I didn’t realize that Thanksgiving wasn’t a national holiday until1863…

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

Opening Doors in Time and Mind: The Bookstore Resistance

It was such a comforting moment. I was reading a book where the main character, a bookseller, was watching a customer reading the classic novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. The man was old and seated in a cushioned chair, at a table, sipping coffee. Books were scattered everywhere, not just on the wood shelves. There was mismatched artwork on the somewhat peeling walls. Lights hung from the ceiling creating areas of clarity amidst the soft darkness. Snow increasingly falling outside as the world turned dark. Yet inside, it was warm. A fire was going in the woodstove. Such a comforting moment.

 

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown is part urban fantasy, part mystery and adventure, part romance⎼ and partly an examination of the psychological effects of pain and grief. Shortly after the book begins, the main character inherits a magical book that allows them to travel from any unlocked door to any other they can clearly imagine. There are all sorts of magic books in the story⎼ a book of shadows, for example, enabling the holder to disappear and become a mere shadow passing through any space. There’s a book of Illusions, one of luck, destruction, etc.

 

We never know what a book might reveal. They’re all around us or used to be. Like doors. Like places in the mind, or in our homes, schools, or workplace; memories, ignored bits of reality. Places we can step through to taste or digest; or to dwell fully and beautifully. Some with a hidden power.

 

When I was 18 or 19, I walked through an open door into the old Barnes & Noble Bookstore in the Village, on 8th Street & 6th Avenue, in downtown New York City. Back then, it was a smaller, more intimate store, not like the chain stores of today. I was just wandering the aisles, hoping to find a treasure, when I noticed a man and woman, maybe in their 70s, in the philosophy section in the back of the store. They were discussing the French activist and philosopher, J. P. Sartre and his concept of authenticity. They were both dressed in old but expensive clothing. The woman looked sort of regal, the man very professorial. They intrigued me but I respected their privacy and felt too embarrassed to get close enough to listen in on their conversation. So, I moved on.

 

I ran into them 2 more times. One time was at a lecture on Thoreau in an upper middle-class neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan. Someone at the lecture told me they had escaped from the Nazis in Austria. I don’t know the truth of this, but supposedly she was from a noble family, and he was a professor, but I don’t remember in what field. And later, back downtown on 6th Avenue, I was surprised to see the woman alone on the street, begging for money, and aggressively berating those who pretended not to see her.

 

Another doorway, in a recent dream. I entered what at first appeared to be the home I grew up in, where my parents lived for almost 30 years after I moved out. But in the dream my parents had sold that house. The dream home was slightly different, and in bad shape. The bathroom was not working. I had to sleep on the couch in the living room, not my old bedroom.

 

And my parents were very old. Someone said my mom was near death. My dad was in only slightly better shape. All at once, several people I didn’t know, mostly younger, in their twenties or thirties, came out from the back of the house, talking loudly amongst themselves and crowding the living room. Outside, through a window, I saw someone park, get off a motorcycle, and walk away. One of the younger people claimed the bike had been stolen and now returned. My dad, who had never in his life been on a motorcycle let alone driven one, put on a leather jacket and helmet, climbed on the bike, and tore off. Maybe he had stepped through a doorway to a younger self, as he looked so much younger, with his back straighter than it had been in years…

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

A Dream of a Mirror Bird: As I Looked at It, It Looked at Me

Last night, I had a dream that, afterwards, I realized very neatly mirrored events that had been dominating my life. It started with a bird. Maybe it was a robin, or a cat bird, as it had that classic robin-like bird shape. I could not see the red breast or any colors in the dream; the bird was larger and a bit thicker in the middle than most cat birds.

 

And it had such big eyes. The dream, as far as I remember it, started with the bird hanging out on a tree branch, looking at me, like it had selected me out of all humanity, and it wanted something from me.

 

I had written a blog recently about a stray cat who first visited us months ago. He was skinny and all beat up when we first saw him and would come to the door of our house crying for attention. But whenever we went to the door to talk with him, he would immediately run away. Disappear.

 

And my wife and I heard from 3 of our neighbors that he had done the same at their house. But finally, we left out food. And he came, slowly, over days and weeks, to eat it, and eventually to trust us. We then brought him to the ASPCA for neutering and then our vet for tests, shots, and treatment. His coat improved from the food and care.

 

And he dominated much of our attention, making our other two cats jealous. Tests showed he had feline AIDS, so we were fearful that if we of took him in, he’d infect the others. But the wonderful vets at Cornell Veterinary School and three adoption agencies reassured us. They said the disease is almost always spread from a deep bite. We didn’t know what to do. At first, we tried to find him a home where there were no other cats, but we were unsuccessful. And we couldn’t just kick him out. We had begun to love him.

 

So now he’s ours, or we’re his. Whenever he sees us, he rushes happily into one of our laps. We named him Mr. Night, as he seems to most need to be with us at night.

 

But the dream bird did not run away as the real cat originally did. After the dream-me saw it, or it saw into me, so many other people got involved, people I can’t now identify. Somehow, the bird got adopted, sort of, by this group. It became the center of events, like what happened with the stray cat that had adopted us. But unfortunately, so much of the memory of the bird disappeared as soon as I woke up. As soon as my waking consciousness took hold, the bird consciousness was gone, leaving only its tracks in my mind.

 

I know many things happened….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

What Makes a Relationship Work? Allowing Another’s Well-Being to Be as Important as Our Own

This might be one of the most challenging blogs, stories, poems I ever tried to write. It tries to get to the heart of my life without getting too personal, which is clearly a delicate balance. It was written or is being written both at night, in my dreams, and in the daytime. We might all know or think we know what a relationship is. But maybe it’s also something more than we realize, constantly changing as we live.

 

Blogs often arise when I see a hint of what is usually not seen and then follow it, try to open it up, or open me up. Last night, for example, I had this feeling that there was nothing more to write about, nothing more hidden away. Then, in a dream, the hidden side of that feeling was exposed, and there certainly was something there. Something that is almost always with me.

 

In the dream, a young boy and a woman were sitting at a table with me. I didn’t know the boy. My dream self knew the woman, but I don’t think my daytime self does. We were talking about human relationships, particularly intimate ones, and the boy kept asking, what do you mean?

 

For me, like most teenagers and people in their early twenties, relationships of any type, family, friends and certainly lovers, were one of the most important aspects of life. It was not just about fun and pleasure. It was an attempt, a yearning, to get to know how another person experienced life, experienced pains and joys, challenges, and insights ⎼ and to get to know how other people saw me. Such an experience was too fascinating, too powerful to ignore. At its base was the desire to love and be loved. I thought of each person that attracted me as a mystery waiting to be revealed. But unfortunately, I only found glimpses of what I sought. I didn’t know how to go deeper. It felt like I might lose myself if I did.

 

Then it, like everything, changed. I met someone and realized I could truly love this person.

 

The psychologist Carl Jung theorized that when we’re first attracted to someone, we’re perceiving in the other elements of ourselves we’ve denied, lost, or neglected. Our attraction is an attempt to recover what was lost. We project an emotionally charged image of the other person, creating a fascination for them. And likewise, we can think this other person is responsible for our own emotions, our love.

 

But to maintain a relationship, we must let go of what first attracted us, let go of this image and fascination, to find the reality, find the truly breathing person. And if we think of the other as the source of our loving, we never see, never truly feel, who we are. We give up our power over our own emotions and look for ourselves in the wrong places. We get habituated to looking outside ourselves to satisfy what lives inside us. Instead, we must make a decision of sorts, to be honest about who these two beings standing here, now, are.

 

In the dream, I said to the young boy that a loving relationship isn’t really a relationship at all, and it’s not just between two people. But I’m not sure what the dream me meant. It sounds deep, but maybe it’s got a dream logic that makes no sense in the daylight.  Relationship– the roots and etymology of the word takes us to re, meaning back or again, and the Latin relatio, or refero (I relate, refer), fero meaning to bear or carry. It can mean a type of association, kinship, where we carry inside us another being. Another being comes alive in us. Maybe, we bear the weight of feeling vulnerable, and allowing another’s well-being to be as important as our own.

 

Maybe the dream me was referring to the fact that we all exist in a larger setting, a community, a world. Or maybe he was talking about something else……

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

**The photo is of my parents.

 

 

Musing On a School “Where Dreams Are Born” Revisited: A Model of An Alternative Style Education

For too many students, schools are like factories. They are large institutions where they are inspected, tested, and rated until they are passed on to other schools or employers where they are further tested and rated.

 

But for others, at least many students from the Lehman Alternative Community School (LACS), a 6-12 public alternative in Ithaca, New York, school is a place where dreams are born. A place where the education of the capacity for imagination, for feeling that life is alive with possibilities, shares the stage with being a knowledgeable citizen and the capacity to think critically. This insight was inspired by a graduate of LACS, John Lewis. When he was a student, he created a mural of Peter Pan characters whose faces were those of students and staff from the school, youthful dreamers dreaming. I was lucky enough to teach there for 27 years.

 

In July 2014, before the pandemic and when teaching, learning, and gathering was easier, LACS had its 40th Anniversary Celebration reunion. I went to the reunion thinking about all the dreams students had had for their lives, thinking even about my own dreams. How many saw their dreams realized? How many would remember the school, and me, fondly and think we had prepared them well for the world? As soon as I opened the door to the beautiful guesthouse where the first reunion event was held, I had my answer.

 

But first, think about dreams. There are so many different, even conflicting, ways we use the word ‘dream.’ Night dreams can feel like an expression of what is most intimate to us, unknown to our own conscious awareness as well as to others. So, we often push them away.  We live our lives surrounded by a largely unknown territory of our own making.

 

Then there are daydreams. By daydreams we can mean those moments when we drift from the reality of now into flights of fantasy. Or we imaginatively explore possible courses of action or the meaning of different experiences. We use the mind like a chalkboard or play movies of our own creation and explore scenarios of what might be. We set our mind free.

 

How well we use our capacity to dream depends on how much we are aware of what we’re doing. After a night-dream, we might think of our self as the hero or heroine. But that can be deceiving. We perceive or experience each scene in a dream from either the perspective of a character in the dream who looks like us or from a “godlike” perspective looking down on it.

 

We can take this person who looks like us for the self, but I think this is a mistake. I think each dream image is ambiguous, probably in several ways, but one way is that each element of the dream is yours. You are not just any one character but everyone, the whole scene.

 

When you have the nightmare of being overwhelmed by a flood, you are not just the being overwhelmed. When you are hugged by the love of your life, you are both hugged and hugging. You can take in the whole as revealing something about yourself, not just one element of it.

 

And this gets us back to the reunion which lasted from Friday night to early Sunday evening. Saturday included an ASM, or All School Meeting, as part of a Symposium on Education. At LACS, once a week the whole school meets to discuss some issue or proposal or to share an event together. So, this was a poignant blast from the past for many graduates….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

**This is a re-write of an earlier piece published in From the Finger Lakes: A prose Anthology, and on this website.

 

***Mural by LACS graduate John Lewis.

We Just Don’t Know, but We Can Wonder: Is Uncertainty A Blessing, A Curse, Both, or Just Reality?

Every once and awhile, we turn on a radio program, pick up a book or newspaper, get a text, and right there waiting in the headline or title or first line is information relevant to a question or concern we were wrestling with.  This happened to me yesterday.

 

I was reading a book of essays by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli called There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy, and the World. I’ve been reading the book on and off for a month or so, and it keeps sparking insights. I wrote about buying the book as a gift to myself in a previous blog.  The latest chapter I read is called “Bruno de Finetti: Uncertainty Is Not the Enemy.”

 

Bruno de Finetti was a relatively little known Italian probabilistic statistician, college lecturer, and philosopher of science. The chapter discusses the impossibility of having absolute knowledge and certainty. Uncertainty is a critical element of reality.

 

This is not news. We might think we have absolute answers, think we know what’s true. But all we really have, and many of us somewhere know this, is a subjective notion of what might probably be true.

 

We can, says Rovelli and de Finetti, diminish uncertainly. We can develop, through rigorous examination, justified and credible convictions that are shared by others who have rigorously studied the subject. But we can’t make uncertainty disappear. All we can hope for is reliable probability.

 

And uncertainty can be a positive lifelong companion, says Rovelli. If there were no unknowns, there would be no possibilities. It makes life interesting. Yet, how often do we pray for it to be otherwise?

 

Although it can lead to debilitating worry and anxiety, it can also energize us to prepare, and learn more about ourselves and a situation. So much depends on our response. Do we try to hide from any awareness of our feelings and limitations, or study and utilize that awareness? Because we don’t have complete knowledge, we can and need to continuously learn. Adapt. Listen to other beings.

 

At night, the dark makes the borders between almost everything more indeterminate, returning almost everything to the realm of what’s unknown. That realization, and the stories dreams weave in us about our lives, help us wake in the morning to a fresh, new world. Uncertainty can do the same for our time in the light.

 

Yet, we know too well that such intellectual realizations, no matter how insightful, are not enough. The intellect can point out a path but not walk it for us. We need to learn additional skills and a different sort of rigor, one of the body and emotions, to check on our reasoning. We can learn to better self-reflect on our thinking by using a sustained, moment-by-moment, kindly attention, to feelings, sensations, thoughts, and inclinations to act….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

 

The Snow Falls in Slow Motion as the World Turns too Fast: We Age Slowly and Feel It Suddenly

After several days of dangerous weather throughout the nation causing too much death and disruption, a “cyclone bomb” in many places, going from rain to ice to blizzards, with extreme windchills ⎼ temperatures changing where I live in a matter of hours from 45 degrees Fahrenheit to zero or below ⎼ today is cold but the snow is falling lazily, individual flakes dropping from a still, gray sky.

 

Inside myself, there’s a stillness in the center of a storm. A feeling that my life is changing too quickly, that I’m aging too quickly. Despite being 75, until recently I had felt internally maybe 35 or 40. Still exercised an hour and a half to two hours each day. Still wrote blogs each week. Until a year or so ago, despite being retired from regular teaching, and when the pandemic allowed it, I still led an after school martial arts class at my old school. But not this past year. One health concern after another, and the sickness and death of friends and family ⎼ this is aging me.

 

Add the earth in tears with so many species in crisis and near extinction; so much hate, politically manipulated hate and violence, thanks a great deal to a former President who, despite now being out of office, is still lying about and working to overturn an election he had lost, overturn democracy. Then there’s the invasion of Ukraine and the pandemic ⎼ this ages all of us.

 

My dad died at age 96. Before dying, he looked me in the eye and said, “you know, this man is dangerous.” He was warning me that DJT reminded him of the early years of Hitler. He would say the would-be dictator’s name, but wouldn’t say the German dictator’s name, and wouldn’t say ‘Nazis’, just pronouns, ‘him’ and ‘them.’ This wasn’t a warning I needed. But it did make the DJT presidency even more real and frightening to me.

 

Months earlier, my dad had talked about spending his whole morning just getting dressed and ready for the day. And then most of the evening getting prepared for bed. I wasn’t the most understanding, then. My comparative youth got in the way. But now I feel what he was saying. We age to the point where we spend most of our day waking up and then going to sleep. Or maybe, we do that our whole lives without realizing it, preparing for life instead of realizing we’re living each second of it.

 

We think death won’t touch us, then it does, and powerfully. At some point we need to look at the slowly falling snow and realize here we are. This is it. We’re falling; we have been falling since we first stood up. And now, the flake of snow is getting closer to the ground.

 

Can this closeness turn the whole thing around and make us also closer to waking up, to wising up as we get closer to dying?…

 

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

How We Look Is Not Separate from What We See: Giving Form to What’s Most Intimately Ourselves

Sometimes, we surprise ourselves with what we can do, with what we know and don’t know.

 

I retired from teaching secondary school ten years ago. But last night, in my dreams I was once again teaching. In many classes, ten, twenty, thirty students or more showed up. In others, only one or two.  Maybe students had begun to assume that I would always be there and took me for granted. Or maybe they were too distracted by their personal lives, or I was getting too tired. Whatever it was, my dream-self decided it was time to retire.

 

In one room, a large group of students came to hear and join me in saying goodbye. It was surprising how full of feeling the situation was. We accepted each other so deeply. And I had nothing planned. It was all spontaneous. What I said emerged extemporaneously, as if from all of us together, and included nothing about goodbyes.

 

The way a moment forms has so much to teach us and is teaching us so much as it forms. There is so much there if we can see it and feel it. It’s the ultimate teacher. In fact, we are this forming of a moment. But will we look? Feel?

 

And I woke up. Sort of. The light outside was a gray mist emerging from the dark night, a dawn just beginning to gray. Outside the window, almost no discernible objects emerged from the mist, no trees, or bushes. But in the mostly dark inside, I could discern the placement but not the details of the bed, dresser, and other furniture. And as I wrote down the dream on a pad of paper by my bed, I wondered if anyone in the dream, any student had understood what I was saying.

 

Then I realized the answer in the dream was also a question. Do I understand my own answer?

 

Research and theories by psychologists and neuroscientists speculate one purpose of dreaming is to integrate emotional, and other material from our daily lives. Was the dream an example of that integration process? Was it telling me what my conscious mind couldn’t figure out or was it merely putting into words what I had already concluded? We often underestimate the role the unconscious and the resting mind plays in conscious and critical thinking. Our conscious understanding never gets it all. But if we humbly accept that, sometimes what we find surprises us with its depth and value…..

 

**To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Party of Hungry Ghosts: What Reveals the Origins of Our Thirst So We Find the Water that Fulfills Us

The political situation we are in today reminds me of a frightening dream I had as a teenager. I was outside, at night, on a mist-filled city street and felt something calling to me. I didn’t know what it was, but I followed it anyway to an old storefront, the kind with a door set between two showcase windows, which were empty of everything but darkness. The door was partly open, so I stepped inside.

 

The dark and emptiness continued inside the front room. But the call grew stronger as I walked. I followed it to an even darker back room where I could feel but could not see. And the room was not empty. The call was ringing in my mind, emerging from one corner filled with what I thought were people standing eerily still. I approached one, then another, tentatively reaching out to identify them. They were not breathing, not alive. I started searching more frantically, to find the source, the being, the life that was calling out for me.

 

And then I felt it, there, before me. A powerful, child-sized mannequin with a voice. But it had no head.

 

Teenagers can easily feel a type of solipsism, a fear that they are alone, isolated, or afraid that what they feel, no one else feels. That they are, in a way, the only human, or only human like them. Their need calls out for them, but they fear no one will be there when they respond, so they don’t. Adults can, of course, feel something similar. It is too easy to lose touch with the rest of the world.

 

Zen teacher Katsuki Sekida, in his classic book Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, said we suffer when we don’t understand the reflecting action of consciousness. Although the world is always whole, never divided, we don’t always experience it that way. We first sense the world, then have thoughts about or reflect on what we sense, then reflect on reflections.

 

This goes on moment after moment. We reflect on what has already gone and can mistake the reflection for the reality. Consequently, we are always rushing to catch up. The reflection can be powerful; but it is so much smaller than the total reality that gave birth to it.

 

Out of such thoughts self-consciousness is born. Self-consciousness can mean “aware of oneself” or distant from oneself and uneasy about it. We separate the object of awareness from the act of being-aware and create this distinct being, with specific characteristics and history who has thoughts. We fashion an ego and then try to pin it down, give it life, and maintain it, but we can’t. Because it’s an apparition. It’s more like a suit of clothes we put on than the body that wears them.

 

One of the key battles of human history is to feel the life of the world, the life that resides in all of us. To feel that the world is alive, not dead ⎼ not a machine, not just dead matter. So much of the world breathes and feels. We struggle as a species to even feel the reality of others and thus to come alive to the reality of ourselves….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

The Well of Ancients: We Live in a Universe, Not A Room

Have images of someplace you have never been, or of a time or situation you have never lived, ever appeared in your mind masquerading as a memory?

 

Years ago, my parents lived in Atlantic City, New Jersey. One night we were driving on Atlantic Avenue, the main street of the city that runs parallel to and often just a block or so away from the ocean. It was raining and the yellow lights reflected off the wet street. The houses on a long section of the avenue are large, expensive dwellings, some old and going back to the 1930s or before. And suddenly I felt we were back in the 1930s during prohibition when some of the homes were owned by mobsters. The whole mood had changed into a feeling different from any other I have ever felt. This happened two or three times.

 

My great aunt Fanny, sister of my maternal grandmother, died when I was in my thirties. When I think of her apartment, I get something closer to a dream than a memory, and just pieces, not the whole. And those pieces are not from the second half of the twentieth century. They are from sometime earlier⎼ with dark hallways, a bedroom with a wall of ornate glass doors which she didn’t have, a window that looked out not onto modern streets but gray mists, people in dark clothes in a village of wood homes, in the “old country” of Eastern Europe from where my relatives emigrated.

 

And from where do our interests come? Why do some subjects, seemingly from before we were born, excite or shake us up, turn us off or get no response at all? I love the art of Japan, Tibet, Indigenous North America, Central Africa, Ancient Greece, and the Middle East, but other places less so or not at all.

 

Twenty years ago, I was on sabbatical from teaching, and my wife and I went to Greece. I taught philosophy to high school students and looked forward to visiting the birthplace of Western European philosophy.

 

We were on the island of Crete, not far from the city of Chania, driving through the mountains after visiting the ancient City of Aptera. The city had come to an end possibly in 1400 CE due to an earthquake. We stopped at the ruins of a Minoan palace, and Roman and Byzantine structures. My wife saw a herd of sheep grazing on the side of the road and asked me to stop. The sheep were not fenced in but moving freely about.

 

We stopped, got out of the car, and walked over to the sheep. I happened to look down, and there, partly exposed, were ancient bricks, Roman, maybe 2000 years old. An archaeological site was close by unearthing a Roman villa from that time, with sculptures, lintels and other artifacts just lying on the ground. We continued our walk and found ruins of a Roman cistern. Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, we saw a German bunker from World War II, and later, an Ottoman fortress.

 

What is it like to live in a place where we literally step on thousands of years of human history? …

 

To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

**The photo is of what might be the oldest road in Europe, from Knossos, Crete.