At the end of August this year, I took a trip to Greece that included the following places; Crete, Athens and Santorini.  I was in Greece, Skiatos, in my twenties, with my boyfriend, on a pre honeymoon, before we got married in December 1979. 

We travelled from Ireland, and had a high time, meeting one of his professors by chance, finding mountain hikes, the nude beaches and places where they sold sheep’s yogurt and home made brown bread. My memory of lamb cooked with eggplant and butter stays with me still. 

At that time the housing was not secured on Skiatos, one of the more Northerly islands in the Adriatic See, where we planned to stay most of our time. When we landed, the boat was met with perspective room renters and when the dust settled there was just a young boy with a donkey standing there, who indicated we should follow him. He put our one big case on his donkey. 

We walked up many steps to a house. Our landlady offered us a room with no walls and a cement floor. We were reassured that a finished room was available the following night. It was evening, and we were on foot. 

 I was stung by a bee that first morning but was compensated with a breakfast of eggs and milk.  The omelet was cooked in olive oil and the milk was hot. There were olives on the side. 

We had a meditation practice by then and we meditated together. We could hear the prayers being sung from a nearby Coptic church. A memory of meditating beside a round short tower near the water comes to mind.  We had a little private spot on the side of the tower nearest the water. 

When I told one of my sisters about going to Santorini this year, she told me of her adventures there in the seventies when she went with a couple of friends for a vacation. There were only donkeys at that time to meet the boat. She was young and slim and the donkey handler had no bother placing her on one of the donkeys. Her memory was of the donkeys passing gas all the time as they went up the steep path. 

Sometimes the donkey owner would lift her off her donkey and place her on another. She was mystified by his behavior. He had a spare donkey and wanted to share the load or he found that lifting her back and fourth was altogether to his liking. 

When she was in Santorini, she bought some postcards of the donkeys and wrote a note home to our parents in Westmeath in Ireland. When that card arrived, my mother handed it to my father, as he was sitting in the kitchen having a rest after his morning of farm work and a hearty midday dinner. 

When he read the card, he started laughing and our mother reported that he laughed hard for a good twenty minutes solid. Something my sister said about the “farting” donkeys seemed to set him off laughing.

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We went to a nude beach back then.  I asked the woman of the house about  the beach and she said that if she went there, she would have to throw away her wedding ring. We did not have much language in common but she gestured throwing away her ring several times.

While at the beach sunbathing, I got stung again by a bee, that landed on that little space between the cheeks.  I made an involuntary clench when the bee landed and bingo I was stung. We quickly dressed and left without looking back. 

On one hiking adventure up a mountain, we could hear singing.  We were out hiking for most of the day. We were met by a man with a donkey . He insisted we take some figs, black from one basket and green from the other, hanging on either side of the donkey. He wanted us to take a drink from his shared bottle, but we were reluctant.

Dreams: I am hearing some dreams. I was asked, today, by a fellow Qi-gong exerciser what a dream meant, in which the bathroom she found was covered in piles of poop. 

The word scatology was put forward by our fearless leader and she ventured that the dreamer was dealing with too much of other people’s scat. I volunteered that she was not dealing with her own scat. We had a good laugh as we got going with our exercises. 

Then the dreamer said that she had another dream when she was eighteen years old, in which she was maiden in a beautiful Indian village and each teepee had different uses and wares in them. She was a healer back then. But in the dream she had to go to the bathroom. When she woke up she had peed in her bed. She asked what it meant and I said she would have to book an hour to figure it out. “A whole hour?” she asked?

Later in the exercise session, I decided to say what was on my mind about that dream. It occurred to me that she was in a past life memory which came back to her at that time when she is deciding what path to take in this life. She has a healing practice now and works with many people. Wetting her bed ensured that she hold on to that precious memory of when she practices the healing arts in a previous Indian life. Over forty years later she remembers it crystal clear even if past live theory is not in everyone’s holy books. 

You can sign up for my blog on this web site, so that it will come to you as an email.  I hope you enjoy, like and/or comment.  You can send me some of that marvelous energy you raise in prayer and meditation. We will both be the better of it. Love you all and may All Love Surround you. Asking for Love that is pressed down and full measure, a blessing not room enough to receive. Love From Rose.