The idea of being a guest blogger ignited my thinking around the idea of perspective and how important diverse and expansive perspective are to both growing children and growing parents.
Having lived my entire childhood, my youth, and most of my adult life in America, I feel a strong connection to all things American. For better or worse. everything from baseball and beer commercials, two-party politics and ex-Monsanto executives serving as Supreme Court Justices to Native American "reservations' and ancient Redwoods, Nat King Cole and Nirvana, my psyche is saturated in Americanisms.
More recently, the smoothie of my consciousness has been enriched by some new perspectives. My son Phoenix and I have lived the last five years on an agricultural Greek Island. Here my ancestors, famous for their strides in the Maths, Sciences, Philosophy and the Arts, and on this particular island healing and medical insights, our perspective has expanded. The shift of perspective that a connection to my roots and a view of the USA from the outside has offered has been enlightening and instructional on many levels.
As a suburban teenager growing up in a typical white-picket fence, two-car garage community, mowing and watering the lawn in the spring and summer and raking and bagging the leaves to be discarded with the trash in the fall, were not only part of my weekly chores, but became a way of earning money, as I went to work for a friend's lawn care business. In those days the thought that row after row of manicured grass lawns just might represent an enormous waste of resources, was not yet even in the germination stage of my conscious thinking.
Here on the Island of Kos, in the Aegean Sea, the only grass fields are the ones cultivated for playing football(or soccer as it is known to Americans). The typical home here is surrounded by olive, orange, lemon and pomegranate trees and likely has grape vines somewhere on the porch or terrace. Once spring comes, whatever front or back yards locals have, no matter how small or big, are turned into farming space. With the first day of Spring a week away, I have been spending the last week starting seven different kinds of tomatoes, cucumbers, red peppers, some rare green beans passed on from the Cherokee (pre-America) nation, lots of watermelons and cantaloupes. Greens and herbs I will sow directly into the Earth in the next couple of weeks.
This photo, is not me as a suburban American teenager, but my son Phoenix before a traditional Greek dance performance.....
