old greek man and his bird shack of life | santorini
santorini, day 9
one day i walked off the beaten path - away from the empty caldera side resorts - inland, looking for a footpath to the beaches on the other side of the island. i came upon a world of dusty landscapes and cactus plants, where i saw no one (except a few houses, dried up vineyards, and a single spotted horse) and i was sure that i had landed in a place that few foreigners had traversed before.
on my way to this footpath, i passed an old man who was getting off his motorbike to head to a shack made out of rift-raft. (where i come from, we try to avoid old men going to abandoned shacks in the middle of nowhere.)
but i smiled and greeted him on my way there, and shortly, after a few wrong turns and slippery dirt roads (and my palm covered in cactus thorns, from a unplanned cactus fruit picking), I decided to abort my mission and return home.
then on my way back, i passed the old man again, who was sitting inside the shack. he motioned me in - and showed me five cages of more than a dozen tiny birds fluttering, flapping their wings wildly. each cage had bird food inside. they were clearly wild birds - because caged birds do not flap their wings like that.
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he barely spoke english, but he offered me water to drink, and motioned me to sit down. so i sat there with this old man, watching those beautiful tiny wild birds.
and I understood that he came here everyday to feed the birds, and to sit here, looking at them for a while. and then, he would open the cages and let them go.
the moment I stepped into his dark bird shack, my heart was washed with this sense of awe and beauty. (birds have had a strange symbolism and reoccurance in my life this past year). and I was moved that he was sharing it with me — with such generosity and hospitality. the moment I stepped inside, I knew that this was it - the reason for my day’s adventure. I could go home now.
by the time I left the bird shack, waved goodbye at him passing on a motorbike, walked along a winding road up to the caldera side - past the empty white luxury villas built for wealthy tourists — I felt so overwhelmed that I needed to go home and sit down.
this was the essence of life, presented to me in fifteen minutes. the contrast between those two worlds I just saw.
the empty artifice — those luxury villas built as a theatre for tourists and temporary escape from daily stresses - and the real thing — the old man, in the middle of nowhere, and his birds inside the shack - untamed.
birds are the real thing. you cannot capture the real thing - if you do, it dies. maybe not literally. but its spirit does.
you can only build a little shack and offer it some food, so that, maybe, once a day, it will come and you can sit amongst its flapping wings; its life force. sit in the quiet, without words, and just look.
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