By the end of our six-week journey we had visited ten monasteries on Mount Athos and twenty-four islands, many during
a twenty-three-day cruise of the Sporades, Cyclades and southern Dodecanese aboard a seventy-foot sailboat. We climbed
fourteen mountains (inclusive of some very high hills), and
explored four caves. Our undertaking was audacious, but in
performing it we found eternal Greece alive and quite well.
The trip reconfirmed that in nature and occasionally in architecture and art, the self is provided, however fleetingly, with
a divine milieu that reaffirms the existence of a supernatural consciousness. In Greece one���s senses are extraordinarily
heightened���by the sun, the sea, the air, the green, the islands,
the stones. To a New Englander brought up on Emerson and
Thoreau and to a Georgetown graduate enamored of Teilhard
de Chardin, Saints Augustine and Loyola Greece connotes the
transcendental and the religious. In every stone we collected
from each mountain and island we visited one could find the
force of Chardin���s divine matter.
A
fter arriving on Austrian Airlines at Thessaloniki, Greece���s
second city, Constantino and I met Hannes, our Zurs, Austria ski and mountain guide���now a banker���and Jared, then
vice-president of Christopher Hyland, Inc. Later, after a panoramic ride on the front upper level of a double-decker bus to
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