In just a little over a month, Holy Ground is happening again. And just like every year, I find myself at a threshold around this time, listening. Observing what has always been at the core of it, and what is coming to the surface now. How we are being asked to come together in this very moment in time.

Holy Ground isn’t easy to define in mainstream terms. It sure is more than a simple gathering, and it is definitely not a “retreat”. It’s not exactly an artist residency either.

It is an invocation to the artist. But also to the muse. To land and place. To memory. To the forces that shape a work before we ever call it ours. To whatever happens when the artist ceases, for a moment, to be the centre of the creative act.

WHY ME?

I ask myself this silly question every year, to test the waters.

Why am I the one making this invitation? Why am I asking people to come here? Why am I holding this particular space, in this particular place?

And before we speak about invitation, perhaps there is another question.

What gives someone the right to invite others into a place?

I have been sitting with this question for years. Because truth be told, we are living through a strange fetishisation of place.

Landscapes become brands. Islands become archetypes. Entire countries are flattened into projections of ancient feminine energy, goddess culture, ancestral wisdom, wildness, purity. A place becomes an aesthetic before it becomes a relationship.

I have been observing this weird trend where people arrive somewhere they barely know and begin inviting others into it. An immersion. A pilgrimage. A retreat. An experience. Sometimes within months of arriving themselves. It really makes my stomach turn.

Something in all of that like a new-age form of colonialism: the assumption that because a landscape moves us, inspires us, awakens something in us, we somehow acquire the authority to interpret it, package it, and invite others into our interpretation.

But being moved by a place is not the same as knowing it.

And loving our fantasy of a place is not the same as being in relationship with it.

Has a place ever invited us? Have we stayed long enough to be changed by it? Long enough for our fantasies about it to fall apart? Long enough to encounter the place that exists beyond our projections? Long enough to become disappointed? Confused? Corrected?

Long enough to meet people whose relationship with that land has nothing to do with the mythology we arrived carrying? Long enough to understand that what looked like an empty landscape was somebody’s field? Long enough to understand that the tiny chapel we discovered is not an enchanting relic but somewhere a family still comes to light a candle for their dead?

Relationship does something to fantasy. It makes a place less easily consumable. More specific. More contradictory and paradoxical. More alive. And much more mysterious.

This is why Holy Ground took years to exist.

It happened here because here is where I live. In my house. In my studio. Along the roads I walk. Among people who are my neighbours. With materials I have come to know through repetition. It could not simply be relocated somewhere else. If it did, it would become another thing entirely.

For a long time I felt that I needed a yes. Not from some imagined authority but from relationship itself.

It was important to stay. To let the seasons turn over and over around me. To be enchanted, but also to often left naked and awkward and confused. To make mistakes and misunderstand. To learn names and then forget them and ask again. To be welcomed or to encounter a boundaries.

Those uncomfortable rites of passage in the relationship with HERE first made me a visitor, then a neighbour, then a inhabitant and eventually a guardian.

Only after relationship did the invitation begin to feel possible. Only after growing intimacy. This is the ground beneath everything I do here.

I am not bringing people to Crete as though Crete were an “experience” I could provide. She is so much more than that and will always be.

I am simply opening the doors of my studio. For a handful of days, we become neighbours. We make in the place where I make. We walk through a landscape that is not a backdrop to our gathering but the place in which my own life is entangled.

I have never been interested in calling in consumers of an experience. I am interested in partners in attention. Partners in curiosity. Partners in the question of how we meet a place.

There is a difference between bringing someone to a place and bringing someone into relationship with a place.

This is where Holy Ground really begins. Not with our programme, or with clay, or with ritual. With a way of entering.

There are ways of entering a place that close it immediately. Arrive too quickly and everything becomes scenery. A thing. An still image. A proof that we have been somewhere. Holy Ground is a refusal of this. A desire to stay long enough for the surface to split.

To look at a rock until it stops being only a rock. To wonder what it remembers. To enter a chapel and feel that something has already been happening there for hundreds of years without us. To understand that a plant is not only medicine, not only food, not only symbol, but season, weather, labour woven into a cyclical strata of memory and countless hands.

To become curious enough that the world grows strange and unknown again.

This is part of my work as an artist. To see, then to see again. To allow one form to call another form into being.

A rock may become pigment. Clay may become vessel. A seed may become an offering. A herb may become tea, or smoke, or a conversation. A song may become a doorway. A person may become a mirror.

The world is constantly becoming something else. And sometimes the work is simply to notice.

Sometimes the work is to follow the thread. And sometimes, it is to lose it.

I keep meeting Ariadne and Dionysus. Ariadne follows the thread. Dionysus tears the self open.

Somewhere between them is a way of making. Attention and ecstasy. Form and undoing. The hand that shapes and the hand that is guided.

Sometimes I am directing. Sometimes I am being directed.

Sometimes the material resists me. Sometimes it shapes me.

Sometimes the day refuses the plan. Sometimes another person changes the question entirely.

Sometimes the land says no. Sometimes it asks me to soften. Sometimes it asks me to widen.

Sometimes tenderness is required. Sometimes a brutal force is pulled out that I didn’t even know I had in me.

This oscillation matters to me more and more.

These days I am less interested in creativity as self-expression. I find it more intoxicating to observe what happens before expression.

The listening. The disturbance. The thing that enters, and penetrates, and re-arranges us.

The moment when an idea stops belonging only to us. The moment when we become porous enough to receive something we could not have manufactured alone.

This is not passive. It’s a form of authorship, of the relational kind. The artist still chooses. Shapes. Cuts. Refuses. Composes. But no longer from the fantasy that everything begins and ends with the Self.

I think about this often when I look at ancient vessels. Cups, figurines and libation vessels. The object was never the whole thing.

There was the hand that held it and the hand that poured through it. The bodies that stood nearby. The land they were inhabited. The feasts and deaths and seasons it witnessed. The Gods they feared and revered.

What survives in a museum is the vessel. What does not survive so easily is the web of relationship around it.

And perhaps this is part of what draws me so deeply to the ancient cultures of this island, and to vernacular and folk forms of making more broadly. Not because I want to recreate them or because I believe the past was somehow “purer”. Because I recognise another orientation toward making.

The object was not necessarily standing apart from life, asking to be looked at. It was inside life. Passed from hand to hand.

The same is true of so much folk making. A woven cloth was not simply textile art. A loaf was not an aesthetic object. A carved spoon was not design. A lament was not performance.

All that beauty emerged through participation. Fucking vulnerable and active participation. Necessity. Repetition. Devotion. And hands knowing something they had done it a thousand times.

We inherit the objects. But what I am interested in is the relationship.

I don’t think we need to imitate ancient forms. Honestly I think there’s enough objectification happening in our world. I simply believe it is important to ask ourselves what it means to make from inside a living web again.

What happens when a vessel emerges because something needs to be held? When pigment comes from a stone gathered nearby? When a song belongs to a moment rather than a stage? When an object does not represent intimacy with place, but arises from intimacy with place?

This distinction matters to me enormously.

I am not interested in making things that “look” ritualistic.

I am interested in the conditions from which ritual objects emerge.

Perhaps that is one of the oldest things the artist knows:

Making is not always about producing an object. Making is simply one of the ways we enter into relationship with the world.

And increasingly, I think this also lives inside a harder question.

How do we touch the world?

Because there is another fantasy I no longer trust. The fantasy that reverence means leaving no trace. Let’s be honest. We have an impact. We touch things. We rip and break and rupture. We grind and shape and burn. We come together, then break apart.

We are always entering into matter. And matter enters us back.
Always transforming.

Yesterday I struck clay from the earth. I struck and struck and struck her body, gathering lumps of clay rich in red iron. They looked like her stains. Our mother’s blood. It was visceral, animal-like.

I felt uneasy… wondering what reverence means when the act itself is violent. When the taking is brutal.

I sat with this uncomfortable thought. By choosing to lean into it and not look away or cover it up with softcore romantic love and light philosophy, something flipped. A faint taste of metal in my mouth. The taste of a blade of Truth perhaps.

I felt then, that the question is not whether we have impact. Perhaps the question is how awake and honest we are inside the impact. How we choose to show up. What we take. What we return. What we make from what has been given.

To make something beautiful from the earth is not necessarily a soft act. The stone mason hacks into stone and then shapes it into a wall we later call beautiful. The potter cuts, beats, compresses, fires. The cook chops, crushes, boils. The plant is torn from the ground. The seed splits open. The Fire consumes. The Sea pulverises entire cliffs.

Creation itself is not always gentle. And reverence isn’t about promising that we will never alter what we love.

This is part of Holy Ground too. Not because I have an answer. But because this is the field I am inside.

The more years I spend making, the less interested I am in pretending that creation is innocent. The more interested I become in relationship, consequence and reciprocity.

Holy Ground is a place to practise this. To meet what is here. To become like the walls of a clay vessel: standing, yet porous. So that what is here can meet us back and transform our within and without.

Can we meet what is here? And can we let what is here meet us back?

This is what I mean by Holy Ground.

This ground is not inherently more sacred than anywhere else. It’s not a special landscape waiting for us to discover its magic.

This ground is a ground we have learned to meet differently. That we have stopped passing over unconsciously. That has become specific through relationship. A ground whose stories we do not presume to own and where our own projections have had enough time to crack. This is ground that we have touched, and that has touched us back.

This October, Holy Ground opens again.

A small group of us will gather here, at home, for five days. We will make things. And listen. And follow threads. And probably lose some. We will see what asks to be made.

Registration will remain open until September 7 and there are currently two spots left.

If something in you recognises this way of entering the world, you are welcome to come closer.

x

with Fierce Love,

Linda Pappa

Welcome (or welcome back) to this series. Mother Liturgies is a growing body of writing and ritual, exploring the many faces and expressions of the Great Mother. All of it comes from a lived, interdisciplinary experience - merging myth, matter, land and seasonal folk wisdom.

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The grain has been gathered now. And we are just about to gather the grapes as well.

For days I have been walking through fields of golden stubble, observing what remains after the harvest. Not the golden heads themselves, but the stems. The straw. The fibres.

Some seasons, the world seems to be reflected in a single symbol. This summer, everything has become thread.

It’s everywhere. In the dried stems waiting to be broken open. Hidden in the fibers of enormous agave leaves and in the fleece of sheep. For those who pay attention to almost invisible things, it’s in the spider silk that creates a fragile threshold between olive branches. For those who don’t forget the past, it’s visible in the old wooden looms.

It’s carried by stories and women, like Ariadne. And Penelope. And the Fates.

But it also lives in the fabric of our modern lives. In our phone calls. In our social networks. In our fluid friendships. In our grief. When we take a step back, something becomes inevitable.

The world is filament.

I have been sensing the intelligence that seems to gather all these things together. The Mother of the Threads.

I didn’t find her in a book. I just kept meeting her.

Years ago I travelled to a mountain village in Crete to sit around old looms with women of all ages. I remember running my fingers across their wood, carved by many generations of hands. Some of them were carrying sacred symbols… like the ΡΟΔΑΚΑΣ (the flower of life)

Once, someone told me the loom once occupied a place in the home almost equal to the hearth.

It wasn’t just a place. It was a being. And women didn’t just weave cloth in its presence. They wove stories. Pain. Grief. Longing. And sometimes, a song would emerge in between the threads.

The loom listened. It held what couldn’t be spoken.

I remember thinking I wanted to understand weaving. Now I suspect weaving was trying to understand me.

I found dried iris leaves beside a tiny church. Sylvia, my dear friend showed me how to twist them into cord. What seemed brittle became unexpectedly strong.

Since then I have begun finding fibre everywhere. Inside the dried vines of passionflower, I have pulled out long filaments that seem almost impossibly delicate. I have scraped away the thick flesh of AΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ (agave leaves) to reveal the strong fibres running through their bodies… having learned that here in Crete, not so very long ago, people were doing the same.

I keep being amazed at how a plant can appear to be one thing from the outside: a stalk, a vine, a great fleshy leaf… while carrying another material hidden within it. A thread inside the body.

The sacred flax carries this same ancient secret. Its fibres are hidden within the stem and must be released: the stalk softened, broken, the woody matter removed, until what was concealed can finally be drawn out and spun. Linen, one of the world’s most ancient fabrics can begin here.

The outer structure has to loosen. And something has to be scraped away. What was once held together must break open before we can discover the fibre running through it.

The old form must fall apart, to release the thread.

Wool whispered another teaching. A fleece is not yet thread. It feels like a cloud, and when you look closely you’ll see thousands upon thousands of tiny fibres. Each of them far too short to become a garment or a story.

Only through the slow turning of a spindle would they begin to twist around one another. This way, something discontinuous becomes continuous.

No single fibre carries the whole length. Its strength comes from relationship. I have not stopped thinking about that.

The more I reflect on this happening in my own life, the more examples come to my awareness. They humble me. I have been following the threads that brought certain people into my life.

I think of a friend in the US who found my work while David and I were travelling through Japan, without any particular agenda. Japan became a conversation. The conversation became a friendship. That friendship led me to another friend, who had grown up in Crete. That was all before we decided to move here.

Japan. Crete. America. Us all. How could it all be connected? There was a thread. And because we were all being broken down, it became visible.

And then I think of something far more tender. David’s father. After much heartache and disagreement, they had not spoken for more than a year. One day his brother told his father to call. It wasn’t an extraordinary gesture. It was for rather practical reasons.

So his father called. And during that conversation something suddenly moved inside David. He knew he wanted to tell his father that he loved him. He did - and so their great wound got sealed with honey. A short time later his father passed away.

I wonder.

How many hands were holding that thread? How many more before them?

Where did that thread begin? Where did it end?

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A few days ago, we were driving through the mountains, on a pilgrimage that would be weaving timelines together by tracing old memories. Not ours, but hers. Sofia. Our dear friend whose name means wisdom.

Several years ago, many things happened simultaneously on these lands. Sofia, who was born in Crete, felt the call to return and walk across the entire island, carrying one question:

What does freedom mean?

It is an immense question.

It cannot be answered over coffee or solved by a philosophy book. A question that asks to be walked with. So she did.

For six weeks, she wandered from village to village. Village grandmothers welcomed her into their homes. Shepherds brought her cheese to eat. Strangers found her a bed in spare rooms and churches. People made sure she was safe, knowing they might never see her again.

Years later, Sofia told us that of everything she has done in her life, this walk remains her greatest accomplishment. Not because of the distance she covered. But because it was a walk of the soul.

At the very same time that Sofia was walking these mountains, David and I were crossing another threshold in our own relationship with Crete.

We had been returning to the island for years, slowly falling into conversation with her landscapes, her seasons, and her people. The year Sofia was walking these lands was the year we bought our home in the village. The year we stopped visiting and began belonging in a different way.

We knew nothing of Sofia then. We had simply answered the same call, each in our own way.

The mountains had offered us something we had never encountered before. A kind of vastness that felt like home. We didn’t yet have language for it, but we recognised it beyond words.

II. FILOXENIA + WISDOM KEEPERS

Years later, through a series of improbable connections, our paths crossed on the other side of the world. We found ourselves staying in Sofia’s tiny yellow house in Los Angeles.

We arrived as strangers. She welcomed us as family.

That was my first lesson in ΦΙΛΟΞΕΝΙΑ (filoxenia). The word is often translated as “hospitality,” but that hardly touches its depth. Literally, it means “love of the stranger.”

It’s not the polite, manicured hospitality of entertaining guests. It’s something much older. The recognition that the stranger standing at your door might already belong to you. An honouring of the threads that bind us together.

It was the very same generosity that had carried Sofia across Crete years before. The same generosity that still lives in some mountain villages, where people are less interested in who you are than whether you’ve eaten.

This year, Sofia returned to Crete. Not to repeat the pilgrimage, but to revisit it. To thank the people who had opened their homes and retrace the footsteps that had changed her life. We joined her.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. But something in me recognized the importance of returning.

There are people in Crete that are wisdom keepers. I have met them in mountain villages, in tiny kafenions and beneath the shade of old olive trees.

They are shepherds. Grandmothers. Farmers. Stone masons. Mountain men. Fierce women whose hands and faces carry the traces of labour.

By the standards of our age, their lives might seem remarkably unremarkable. Some would call them simple. Others might pity them for what they appear to lack. And yet I have rarely encountered people who feel so profoundly rich. Not rich in possessions. Rich in being.

They are wildly untamed and deeply grounded. Radically fierce and radically loving. They possess a kind of interior abundance that cannot be described. It feels like a shepherd’s hut… and yet it exudes the light of a royal palace.

Their wisdom does not announce itself. It has no need to perform, to persuade, or to prove itself. It simply sits beside you. It pours another glass of raki. It cuts another slice of bread. It waits before answering.

I have come to realize that these encounters have become some of the greatest teachers of my life.

Whenever I have found myself lost on the path, caught in ambitions, identities, or spiritual seeking - it’s not been the retreat, the teacher or the profound book that has brought me back. It’s the afternoon spent with someone who would never think of themselves as wise.

For reasons I still cannot fully explain, these people have returned me to reality more faithfully than almost anyone else. Looking back, I think this has been one of the great gifts these lands have offered me.

III. THE MEMORY OF THE MOUNTAIN

Our drive took us higher and higher. The serpentine road climbed steadily into the Asterousia (star mountains). With every bend the landscape became more bare. The olive trees slowly disappeared. Villages gave way to mineral patterns. The earth turned pale, dry and windswept until, at moments, it felt as though we had left Crete and were driving on the surface of the moon. There is something deeply honest and naked about these mountains.

Nothing here asks for your admiration. There are no lush forests or dramatic waterfalls. Only rock, wind, light, and an immense silence stretching toward the sea. Perhaps that is why they reveal so much.

We drove for a while, absorbing the signal of this place. Then, almost as if he were speaking to the mountain itself, David quietly said,

“I feel like God is testing me.”

The sentence simply remained between us, as natural as the stones surrounding the road. As though these mountains had a way of bringing a person face to face with themselves. Somewhere along that winding road, Sofia’s question returned to me.

What does freedom mean?

For years, I had imagined freedom in much the same way many of us do. I associated it with movement. With choice and having “options”. With independence. With earning enough money to leave in a wide range of situations, from when things get triggering, to when things get uncomfortable, to when shit hits the fan. And never having to stay where things became difficult.

But sitting there among those ancient mountains, none of these definitions felt spacious enough.

Freedom seemed to belong somewhere else entirely.

Somewhere as vast as the sky above us. Only turned inward.

As the conversation unfolded, my thoughts wandered toward language.

Lately, I have found myself returning to ancient words with increasing devotion. Not because I romanticize the past, but because so many of them seem to remember worlds that newer words have forgotten.

Modern language often defines things by their function. It identifies. It categorizes and separates. It seeks precision.

Ancient words often seem to do something entirely different. Rather than closing meaning, they open it. They are spacious enough to hold paradox. They refuse to reduce reality to a single definition.

Take the word ΟΥΣΙΑ (Ousia).

It is usually translated as essence. Yet it also means substance. It is the word used for element. And somehow, it refuses to tell us where one ends and the other begins. - Is essence material? Is substance spiritual? Is an element something we touch, or something we become?

The word never quite settles. It leaves the door open.

I have come to love words like these because they remind me that reality is often far larger than our definitions of it. And then another thought appeared. Perhaps we do not only do this to words. Perhaps we do it to ourselves.

How often do we compress what is immeasurable? So it can become manageable? Understandable? Palatable?

How often do we exchange the vastness of our experiences for convenient descriptions?

Someone asks,

“What do you do?”

“I am an artist, designer, writer.”

“Where are you from?”

“I am from Greece and Luxembourg'“.

Some times it’s “"I was born there, grew up there, my grandpa was from there and this many years ago I ended up here because X and Y.”

No matter how simple or how complex, the answers are always vaguely accurate. And painfully incomplete.

Without noticing, we begin translating ourselves into versions that are easier to understand. More legible and marketable.

Sometimes the process is rather excruciating. Something about it feels very unnatural. A leak of vital energy, as we have entered an unconscious agreement.

We exchange mystery for certainty. Vastness for clarity.

Perhaps this is one of the places where freedom slips through our fingers. Not because someone takes it from us. But because, little by little, we surrender it ourselves.

As the mountains unfolded outside the window, I wondered whether freedom is not simply the ability to move through the world. Perhaps it is the courage to remain larger than the words that try to contain us.

We didn’t yet know that, before the day was over, we would meet someone who embodied this freedom more completely than we had ever seen.

Not because he had found the answer. But because he had never stopped living inside the question.

IV. THE MAN WHO SPOKE TO THE MOUNTAINS

Not long afterwards, we arrived in one of the small mountain villages where Sofia had once been welcomed during her pilgrimage. A handful of stone houses perched above the Libyan sea. The kind of place where time seems to move according to entirely different agreements.

We reached the guesthouse where Sofia had stayed during her pilgrimage. A small cluster of old stone buildings gathered around an open courtyard, as though they had quietly grown out of the mountain itself. As we wandered into the courtyard looking for somewhere to sit and order a fresh orange juice, a tall bearded man walked past us.

He looked at us and asked,

“Εξυπηρετήστε;” (“Are you being looked after?”)

It is such an ordinary question in Greek.

And yet something about the way he asked it stopped me. He genuinely wanted to know.

We settled outside for a while before wandering back into the old trapezaria — the communal dining room. Thick stone walls surrounded the space. Handwoven Cretan textiles hung beside the fireplace. Everything carried the warmth of years of shared meals and stories.

There he was, laughing with a young girl we later learned was his niece. Sofia looked at him for a moment.

“Are you Markos?” she asked.

Years earlier, during her pilgrimage across Crete, someone named Markos had pointed her toward the next village and altered the course of her journey. She had often wondered about him since. He smiled.

“Come, sit.”

He didn’t ask who we were. He didn’t ask where we had come from. He simply pulled up chairs.

For a brief moment, I hesitated.

In another context, we might have worried about imposing. Here, there was only the assumption that if our paths had crossed, then of course we would sit together.

In the mountain villages, relationship is rarely squeezed into whatever time remains after life has happened.

Relationship is life. Everything else quietly arranges itself around it.

Raki was poured. Tomatoes were sliced. Homemade feta and paximadi appeared. Conversation unfolded naturally. No one seemed interested in exchanging biographies. No one asked what we did. No one was trying to become interesting.

We simply began speaking. Not from our résumés but from our lives.

As the conversation unfolded, it became increasingly clear that Markos did not simply know these mountains. He belonged to them.

Every now and then he would glance out of the window and quietly tell us what was happening beyond our field of vision. A couple of eagles had just finished feeding on the ridge. He knew the paths of birds and the names of places that no map remembers.

He wasn’t reciting information. He was speaking about beings he had spent a lifetime with. At one point, we asked him how someone comes to know a mountain like this.

He smiled.

“You don’t come here looking for answers,” he said.

“You simply spend more time with the mountain.”

The sentence entered me before I could think about it.

Because I realised he wasn’t only speaking about mountains. Perhaps this is also how we come to know a person. Or a language. Or ourselves. Perhaps even God. Not by collecting answers. But by remaining faithfully in relationship.

Later, he told us that he feels funny about being asked where he’s from. He told us his favourite answer to that question.

“Well, I don’t really know. I think I’m still trying to figure that out.”

We all laughed with him. But something inside me became completely still.

What if that was freedom?

V. THE KITCHEN

The following morning I found myself back in my own kitchen. It was a Sunday of pure silence.

Morning light spilled through the windows. The cats were napping on the sheepskins. I had just eaten a couple of slices of homemade sourdough and sipped iced herbal tea. I sat at the table filling zucchini flowers with rice and herbs for later.

There was nowhere to be but here. It was one of those mornings that asks for nothing except your presence. And yet, almost without thinking, I reached for my phone.

A podcast. As though silence itself were somehow incomplete.

The first conversation was very intelligent. Well structured. It spoke of spiritual practices, the collective state of the world and personal transformation.

Within minutes, I felt compressed. I turned it off. I tried another.

The same thing happened. It wasn’t the people speaking. Nor was it what they believed or shared. It was something subtler.

Everything already seemed to have an answer.

Reality had already been explained. Categorized. Interpreted. Compressed. Deliverable.

In all of these somewhat “modern” conversations, there was nowhere left for mystery to enter. How ironic, given they were about spirituality. And how triggering, in a great way.

I thought of Markos. Of the wise villagers I have met. Of the mountains. Of ancient words that cannot collapse into a single definition. I thought of questions that ask to be lived with instead of solved.

I realised then what had moved me most in those connections. It wasn’t just the generosity. It’s the relationship to mystery.

They do not pretend to know. They do not rush to master reality. They remain inside it, with awe and humility.

VI. THE COURAGE TO NOT KNOW

When Sofia first crossed these mountains years ago, she carried a question.

What does freedom mean?

When we drove back home, I realised we still hadn’t answered it. Perhaps we never will. But I have begun to notice where freedom leaves us. And where it returns.

It returns whenever we refuse to reduce ourselves to something easily recognisable. Whenever we answer from truth instead of from the versions of ourselves that are easiest to explain. When we leave enough room for another question. When we welcome mystery like a stranger or a lover.

Perhaps it is something we practice.

One conversation.

One word.

One unanswered question at a time.

𖦹

May we become people

who leave the door of our hearts open

and enough room

for mystery to enter.

𖦹

with Fierce Love,

xx

Linda Pappa

𖦹

ps.: If this essay felt like home, perhaps you’ll enjoy walking a little further.

Mountain Milk is sustained by readers who choose to support this work. As a paid subscriber, you’ll receive deeper essays, seasonal reflections, exclusive recordings, and the hidden pieces that don’t always belong in the open.

I’d be honoured to welcome you.

I also love asking the original naming of lands and plants. To learn what the ancient ones would have call a place. It brings my awareness to those who have lived there, who seemingly spoke with that land in an entirely different way. So much unfolds from there. There is so much unexpected richness.

It’s like finding a treasured ancient embroidered cloth under layers of manufactured greige ikea throws.

Words have become commodified. And often, as they travel through time, they become smaller. Not necessarily less beautiful, but less spacious. Flattened.

I have noticed how often words that once held an entire cosmology have evolved to describe only a very practical function. And in this process, something vast gets to be put in a box. Something immeasurable becomes measurable. Something mythical becomes geographical. A relationship becomes a definition.

I think about this often here in Crete. Our island’s highest mountain is known today as ΨHΛΟΡΕΙΤΗΣ (“Psiloritis”). It translates quite literally to: the tall mountain.

It is a perfectly good name. It tells us what we see.

And yet her older name was IΔA (‘Ida’). A woman’s name.

This mountain was not only looked at. It was lived with. She is the mythical birthplace of Zeus, nurtured by the bee nymphs in her womb-like cavities. A landscape that carried story, reverence and imagination.

Whenever I look towards her, I cannot help but see those two great peaks rising like the Minoan horns of consecration. On other days, they feel unmistakably like the breasts of the Mother herself.

Nothing about the mountain has changed. Only the word. Or perhaps, only the way we have learned to speak about her.

I wonder how often this has happened. How many ancient words once held entire relationships that have since become translations.

Recently, another of those words found me.

ΘΕΡΟΣ. Thèros.

Today, in Greek, we call summer ΚΑΛΟΚΑΙΡΙ (“Kalokeri”). Which basically means “good weather.” A beautiful word. Rather carefree. Rather flat, too.

Thèros belongs to another way of knowing. It does not simply describe a season. It describes a state of becoming.

Thèros is the time of the high Sun. Thèros is connected to the verb “Θερίζω” (“therizo”) which means to reap. It is immediately and very physically marking this time of ripening and the first harvest: the grain.

What was once a humble green has drunk enough light to turn gold and carry nourishment. Suddenly, months of invisible work stand before us, as the Earth reaches the fullness of her creative force.

There is an old alóni not far from our home. A circular stone threshing floor where generations once gathered to separate grain from chaff. This is where the grain would go at this time of Thèros.

Nothing happens there anymore. No wheat is spread across the stones. No oxen circle in slow rhythm. No dust rises into the summer air.

And yet I find myself returning there again and again. Standing in its silence, I often ask the same questions.

When was the last harvest?

Who were the final hands to gather here?

When did these stones last witness the rhythm of threshing?

The alóni still seems to remember. I have come to believe that places remember differently than we do. Not through facts but through rhythm.

Sowing. Waiting. Harvesting. Threshing. Milling. Baking. Feeding. Returning.

Even when the gestures disappear, the land continues to hold their imprint.

Perhaps this is why I have become so captivated by the cycle of grain. Not because I farm it, but because I have begun paying attention to it.

The first green shoots after winter. That slow thickening of each stalk. The astonishing moment when entire hillsides begin to glow gold. The patience. The relationship.

It was during this Thèros, just after the Summer Solstice, that three new works emerged in my studio. Without fully realising it then, they became an inquiry into verticality. Into the mysterious upward thrust of life itself.

That movement that belongs to wheat, trees, cypress, flames, wild grasses and our own human bodies.

That impulse to rise. To stand. To flower. To become, without losing complexity. Embracing the fullness of our potency. And choosing to not flatten what we carry. Becoming nourishment, memory, lineage.

Made from recycled brown paper on canvas, wild ochre pigments gathered from the Cretan landscape, and iron oxide, these pieces carry the colours of straw, soil and sunlight. Companions to this season. To this movement. To this word.

Because Thèros is not simply summer. It is the moment when the hidden work of the earth becomes visible. When life stands upright in its fullest expression, just before it offers itself back to the soil.

Perhaps this is why these older words continue to call me. They do not simply name the world. They remind us how to belong to it.

With Fierce Love

xx

Linda Pappa

_

ps.: If this series speaks to you, the three original THÈROS works are available to find a home. If you feel called to bring one into your space, you are warmly invited to reply to this email or get in touch through my website to enquire.

The opening of this piece is freely offered to everyone. The heart of it is shared with those who choose to support this work as members of the Inner Circle.

If you decide to join us, you’ll be invited beyond the threshold into the full essay, together with a companion audio liturgy: my spoken narration woven through an original soundscape created with my beloved David, featuring field recordings gathered here in Crete at the height of early Summer, drums, voice, and the living sounds of the land.

Your support allows this body of work to continue unfolding with the depth and devotion it asks of us. It helps sustain not only these writings, but the rituals, recordings, artwork, and seasonal offerings that grow from the same roots.

Whether you are reading as a free or paid subscriber, I am deeply grateful that our paths have crossed. May this piece meet you exactly where it is meant to.

x

Linda

MOTHER OF THE SUN

The grasses have turned gold. The spring flowers have completed their offering and are beginning to dry where they stand. Seeds are forming. Fruits are swelling on branches. The figs are growing heavy. Pine resin perfumes the heat. Bees move drunkenly through thyme and fennel, carrying golden dust from blossom to blossom.

Everything feels taller now. The vines climb. The cypresses point straight to the sky. The mountains stand sharp against the endless blue. Even the light has changed. It no longer arrives softly. It enters fully. Without apology and without hesitation.

The days seem endless. The world itself appears to be standing upright. And something in the body responds. A desire to move. To create. To declare. To stop hiding.

This is not the tenderness of Spring. It is something else.

A force that asks life not merely to emerge, but to inhabit itself completely.

I have been feeling it everywhere. In the hum of cicadas. In the stone floors that are so hot they burn my feet. In the bees gathering pollen. In the feeling that everything around me is reaching toward something. As though an invisible hand were gently lifting the world toward the sky.

I have been wondering about this force. Not what it wants from us. But what it wants for us. Because every year, around Solstice, I notice the same thing.

The Earth is abundant. She is fertile. She is overflowing. And yet fertility alone is not the whole mystery.

Something else is present. Something that calls things upward.

The seed descends into darkness. But the sprout rises.

The root burrows. But the stem reaches.

The vine grows wildly, yet still seeks a structure upon which to climb.

Life itself seems to move in two directions at once. Downward and upward. Inward and outward. Spiral and pillar. Earth and Sun.

For years I have written about the Mother. The Mother of Nectar. The Mother of Milk. The Mother of Hearth and Home. The Mother who nourishes, receives, remembers, and gathers. She has transformed my life.

Like many women, I first had to reclaim Her within myself before I could recognize Her in the world around me.

I found Her in clay. In flowers. In caves, springs and ancient stories. In the body. In my grief. In beauty and in devotion.

And perhaps this is why I have found it so innate to follow Her thread. But lately, another thread has been tugging at my sleeve, (or rather banging at my chest). It’s not louder. Nor stronger. It was simply waiting for its season.

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The swallows are chirping. Earlier today I sang with them and lulled myself into a soft trance that eventually led me to a long nap. I rested with the door open, welcoming the wind as it moved through the room. My hands were still covered in clay.

I simply rested.

This is not always easy for me.

Like many of us living in this busy world, my mind is often full. There is usually a sense that I should be doing something with my time. Making something. Solving something. Moving something forward.

Even as an artist, whose days are often filled with beauty, there can be a subtle pressure to keep creating, producing, becoming.

Perhaps that is why our days together touched me so deeply.

Because something in me remembered that existence itself is enough.

Over those days, so much moved through me. Not only as someone holding space, but as someone fully participating in it. There was a current running through all of us. A devotion to beauty, presence, reciprocity, and the simple act of being here.

It felt whole. It felt enough.

One of the gifts of facilitating is receiving the reflections of those who arrive. I loved that there were only a few of us, and that each of us came from a very different walk of life.

Vanessa spoke of her desire to cultivate patience. She recognized how much of her life is spent leaning toward the future, always moving toward the next thing.

Tara reflected on how accustomed she is to holding space for others, and how difficult it can be to become the one who receives. She spoke about being touched by the experience of mutuality. Not only giving, but allowing herself to receive from the women around her, from the rituals, and from the land itself.

Marijke arrived needing restoration. Like many mothers, she carries so much. She gave herself permission to soften.

And Zsofia, standing at a threshold in her life, spoke of uncertainty. Working in a deeply caring domain, she has spent years tending to others. Yet something about these days reminded her of what is alive within herself, beneath all the responsibilities.

There were countless moments I could describe.

We sang into the walls of ancient chapels. We sat together in the studio, at times contemplative and quiet, at times drifting into creative states that felt almost trance-like. We walked through old olive groves and allowed ourselves to be claimed by beauty.

Not as spectators. As participants. As beings capable of receiving.

I also find myself filled with enormous gratitude for Adrienne.

We did not set out to become collaborators. This work emerged from friendship first.

Over the years she has taught me so much about slowing down, about self-care, about listening when the body asks for rest. The fact that I can spend an afternoon napping with clay-covered hands instead of pushing through another task is, in part, because of what our friendship has taught me.

I have offered something in return. A trust in the hands and in making. A trust that what arrives from the unseen can be given shape through clay, ritual and beauty.

This is the medicine I return to again and again: guiding people to bring the invisible into matter. Helping them trust themselves as artists and oracles.

On the final day we went to the sea.

We covered our bodies in wild clay from a place I know well. The same clay that finds its way into many of my vessels.

David played music. The sound carried us. We danced as though suspended by invisible threads, pulled into movement by something beyond ourselves. Naked, covered in clay, moving between sea and shore.

At some point Adrienne and I looked at one another. And we broke.

We began to cry. Those tears were not polite, nor quiet. They came from somewhere ancient.

We cried because we realized how rare this is.

How rare it is to feel this free.

This embodied. This present. This alive.

To be in such complete communion with the sea, with the earth, with one another.

The crying turned to laughter. The laughter returned to tears.

It was grief and joy occupying the same body.

A remembrance.

A resurfacing of a memory that has always been ours.

Ten days later, I find myself sitting with that memory. Simply grateful.

I found myself returning to the deeper current beneath all of my work. The thread that has quietly guided me for years. Allowing the hands to become an instrument through which the invisible can take form.

How do we become more intimate with the living world?

How do we remember ourselves as participants?

How do we create in conversation with something vaster than ourselves?

These questions have shaped my practice for many years now. They are what led me to gather wild clay from sacred peaks and remote coastlines. To sit in chapels and sing. To craft rosaries and vessels. To listen to mountains. To pay attention to what’s happening between my individuality and the vastness of the place that holds me.

They continue to shape the work I offer today.

In October, I will open the doors once again for Holy Ground. My annual immersion here in Crete for all beings who feel called toward beauty, ritual craft, prayer, and a deeper relationship with the voice of the ground beneath our feet.

Holy Ground belongs to harvest. To gathering what has been growing unseen. Collecting the fruits of our becoming.

A place for pilgrims of the earth and of the body’s remembrance.

A temporary monastery we create together.

A place to slow down enough to hear what is asking to be gathered, embodied, and offered back to the world.

If these words awaken something in you, I would be honoured to welcome you.

With Fierce Love,

x

Linda Pappa

The blossoms arrive and their scent thickens the air.
The bees return. The whole land hums. And everything begins opening at once. Not only to be admired, but to participate in creation.

From here, all of life surrenders itself to becoming.

Flowering is the moment life offers itself to pollination. To encounter. To inspiration. To fertilization. To the possibility of fruit.

And because of this, flowering carries tension.

All revelation carries tension.

This year, I felt that tension strongly.

It came with a lot of inspiration, but also a lot of pressure. Many things rose to the surface at once. Patterns and dynamics that became impossible to ignore. Resistance. Control. Fear. Inner narratives looping endlessly in the background.

Around that time, I pulled The Star alongside Temperance reversed.

The message felt painfully clear. There was work to do around surrender. Around allowing myself to soften the pace. To stop tightening around the process of becoming. To stop trying to force the flowering.

Because life cannot pollinate what remains armored.

And I realized there were parts of me I could simply no longer carry into this next season.

The question became: How can I possibly transform this?
How can I possibly surrender?

And beneath that, another question slowly emerged:

What must soften in me in order to blossom?

I noticed how much energy it took to remain closed. How much holding. How much bracing. How flowering requires something terrifying and simple: Softening.

Cracking open. Allowing oneself to be seen. Letting the light enter where things have remained sealed. Because when life wants to flower through us, everything that prevents the opening becomes visible.

Every year, this season teaches me something about surrender.

It opens and guides something. Despite the intensity, it remains the time of year I love most deeply.

Because after the pressure passes, something always softens.

And then… the Roses come.

This is the time when the Roses arrive everywhere.

The Rose feels central to this mystery.

Not only because of her beauty, but because of her wisdom.

She opens in layers. Softens gradually. Reveals herself slowly. Protects herself with thorns.

Only the ones who approach with care can come close unharmed.

This too is part of flowering.

Revelation without self-abandonment. Openness without collapse. The ripe understanding that we do not need to harden in order to protect ourselves.

We simply need to learn the intelligence of our own blooming.

This is the season where I begin making rosaries again.

Gathering petals. Working slowly with my hands.
Sitting with the Roses long enough to feel their particular intelligence reveal itself.

In the Orthodox tradition, Mary is sometimes called Ρόδον τὸ Ἀμάραντον — the Rose Unfading.

I have always loved this face of her. She appears Queen like, sovereign, dressed in Red. A vessel of incorruptible beauty. All around her and within her, flowers. In her hand, an eternal Rose. She does not wither because she remains connected to the divine source from which she blooms.

Let’s talk about flowers.

Each flower carries her own temperament. Her own rhythm. Her own medicine. They are daughters of the Mother. To truly be with them feels initiatory.

Some open only at certain times. Some close at night.
Some release their scent only under very specific conditions.

They are not naive. They possess their own erotic intelligence. Their own way of discerning how and when they open. And yet, flowering still requires risk.

A flower cannot pollinate herself into becoming. She must enter relationship.

The flower blooms not as a final form, but as an offering.

She IS the gesture toward encounter. Toward the other. Toward the unknown. Offering herself to pollination. To divine inspiration.

So that the fruit can one day be made.

_

Dear reader… there’s more to this piece. It evolves as a liturgy of swarm, of Red, the many threads and languages of who revealed herself to me as the Mother of Nectar. A special treat for paid subscribers, along with a recorded audio piece to envelop you in the energy. Join intimately and allow yourself to receive.

x

Linda

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In Greece, we call them Τάματα (tamata). But this humble technology of devotion is far older than any name we’ve given it.

Long before saints were painted onto wood, before candles burned in ordered rows, humans were already leaving pieces of themselves behind. At the foot of sacred trees. In the crevices of primordial stones. Beside springs that sung in the language of the earth.

They offered beads, bones, fragments of metal, woven threads, carved symbols. Tokens of longing, of gratitude, of grief.

Not as decoration. But as an exchange.

A way of saying: I ask, and I give.

There was a time I did not know how to enter a church. The air felt too dense. The walls too close.

And yet, something shifted. Not through belief, but through the body. Through Earth. Through working with clay that came from this island. A material already in prayer long before I touched it. Something in that contact rearranged my way of seeing. Slowly, I found myself returning. Not to doctrine. To presence.

Churches here are made of the same elements as the older places. Stone. Lime. Pigment ground from earth. Beeswax that turns to soft flames. Incense suspended in air. Gold catching what little light enters. A space shaped for resonance. For the voice to echo, for silence to deepen. Within it, these small offerings gather.

When I enter a chapel and see these votive offerings gathered beside an icon, I feel a sense of relief. Something in me softens. Because it reminds me that we have not forgotten entirely.

That there are still moments when a human being reaches the edge of themselves and chooses to ask. To speak outward. Toward something vast, unseen, both cosmic and earthly. The mystery. The divine creator. The golden thread and the witness in between everything.

In a world that often asks us to contain everything within,
to solve, to hold, to manage alone, this gesture feels radical.

To admit need. To ask for support. To place a prayer into matter
and entrust it to the whole.

It is so humbling. And perhaps it is this humility that keeps the thread unbroken. The knowing that we are not separate, and never have been.

The Τάμα is not only a religious object. It is a form of memory. A trace of an older intelligence that understood relationship as reciprocal.

You do not only take. You do not only wish. You offer. You mark the moment. You anchor the prayer in matter. You make it beautiful.

Matter, too, remembers. Before the thin sheets of brass and silver, before the small polished forms we now recognize, there were other bodies for prayer and offering.

Clay, taken from the earth, shaped by hand, returned again through fire. Small limbs, eyes, organs, formed in devotion for healing.

Earlier still: beeswax, softened by warmth, held between fingers, shaped in silence. A substance born from the labor of the hive, from thousands of golden bodies working as one. To offer beeswax is to offer something already devotional.

A material that has passed through the intelligence of the swarm,
through the alchemy of nectar and time. Even now, in some places,
this gesture remains and it still carries prayer.

This is what has always moved me most. Not just the request, but the care. The shaping of something with the hands. The attention.
The devotion embedded in form.

As if beauty itself could carry the prayer further.

My own first Τάματα were made in clay. Small forms that were pressed with symbols that arrived without explanation. The earth did not ask for precision. Only for presence.

Each piece a small bridge between what is held in the body
and what is entrusted to the unseen.

In the years since, this thread has continued softly.

Returning again and again as a question:

What does it mean to offer?

To give something of substance. Of time. Of attention. To place it somewhere without guarantee.

A dear friend once told me,

“You taught me how to make offerings, give gratitude and ask for help.”

And I realized this gesture lives far beyond the walls of a church. It lives in how we meet the land. How we leave something behind in exchange for what we receive. A flower. A gesture. A moment of care.

Perhaps this is what the Τάματα remember. That we are not separate. That we are in conversation. And that every prayer is also a relationship. Perhaps nothing ripens without an offering.

In the coming weeks, we will gather around this gesture, through clay, flowers, touch, and attention. Listening for what wants to be given and what asks to be received. This is the ground of Ripening Heart, our gathering at the end of May. A few spots remain available if you feel the call to join us in this special time of the year, led by the Roses.

Recently, this work has also taken shape again in brass: small pieces, cut and carved by hand, carrying the imprint of this ancient gesture.

They emerged through the language of spring. Eggs. Birds in ascent. Pods swollen with light. Figures of the feminine and the Mother. Forms of fertility, of renewal, of life held just before its opening. Not offerings to be left behind, but perhaps something like a memory of one.

Something that can be worn close to the body like a votive
that never quite leaves your side. A devotional prayer that is carried with you.

If you feel called, you can find them here.

with Fierce Love,

Linda Pappa

I didn’t notice it at first. March can still feel like winter in disguise. Rain, heaviness. A kind of lingering quiet. But when I look closer, I see that something has been moving all along. Not loudly, but steadily.

A subtle rising. Everything waking at once. Everything taking its chance. It’s not the bloom yet. It’s the preparation. It’s not the expression, but the gathering of energy that will one day need somewhere to go.

This is how emergence has been revealing itself. Not as a sudden becoming visible, but as a season of making space for life to rise.

I’ve been clearing. Without fully naming it as such.

Letting go of objects and projects that were left open. Of versions of myself that no longer feel alive. Selling old books. Finishing that crochet project that belonged to winter. Closing cycles with more care. Making space, as something that felt necessary. It has felt physical, but also psychic. A loosening and re-ordering of the field.

At the same time, there has been a gentle tending toward beauty. David and I have been working on some things for the house. Designing a curtain. Planning shelves and slowly building them. Figuring things out.

In the studio, I have not really wanted to make for clients. I have wanted to play. To let myself make beautiful things for our home, made of clay. Sculptural bowls in playful shapes that I imagine will be filled with yoghurt and fruit by summer. Little glazed tiles that will eventually bring color into our bathroom.

Forms that do not need to be sold, explained, or fixed into meaning right now. Just things to live with. Things to accompany life.

Emergence is not orderly. It is improvised, with many layers happening at once. It’s not planned. It happens.

There has also been a strengthening. In the body. In the will. In the way I choose to move with my energy. Moving every day. Gently removing what does not bring the best out of me. Even small things. Less caffeine. More clarity. More steadiness.

Preparing for the rise does not only mean dreaming of what is coming. It means becoming more able to hold it.

And then there is the opening toward others. Not overwhelming, or constant. But real. Opening the studio once a week to friends. Sitting together. Making things with our hands. A simple interweaving. The sense that this rising is something we are experiencing as a collective.

The winged ones return. Bees begin to hum. Birdsong fills the air. There is a feeling that something is watching over this threshold. That life is rising together.

Only now, as I step back, I can feel what has been happening.

This is not random. This is the energy of emergence.

Emergence is not the moment of outward expression. It’s not the full bloom. It’s the rising of energy. A vertical movement, like a sprout pushing through the soil. A force that moves from below to above, carrying everything with it, from darkness to light. Anti-gravity. A taking of chance. A rising.

Every seed will try to come out. And not everything that rises will remain. This is why emergence asks for preparation.

Because what rises too quickly can burn. What rises without space can collapse. What rises without enough strength can overwhelm the body that receives it.

This is why emergence so often arrives as clearing. Decluttering. “Spring cleaning”. Letting go. Making space. Tending beauty. Strengthening the body. Choosing more carefully what we carry forward. We are setting the field in order so that life can rise well.

In Greece, there is the Martaki, the small red and white thread we wear in March. It is said to protect us from the early Spring sun.

But I have been thinking… the sun it speaks to is not only above us. It is within us. The red and the white. Blood and milk. Life force and nourishment. This thread around the wrist is like a small teaching.

As life begins to rise, so does the heat. Vitality increases. Clarity sharpens. Something in us becomes brighter.

And if we are not ready - it can overwhelm. And burn. So we clear. We make space. We strengthen. We do not force the rise. We allow it.

Emergence is that fluidity before identity. Nothing is fixed yet. Nothing is named. It is the early childhood of the psyche after being reborn with the seasons. The moment a child learns to walk and explore the world. The “Éveil”.

This is a time where we may dare to risk. To let something appear without knowing what it will become. To play for the sake of playing.

In this time of the year, green arrives everywhere. Wild greens. Green peas. Soft shoots breaking through the soil. Green, the color of the heart. And in the midst of all this awakening, a question:

Can we stay connected to the Heart while everything rises?

Can we remain rooted in feeling while life begins to move again?

Because everything is rising at once. Within. Without.
Individually. Collectively. Like a mycelial web. A wave of life force. A field of movement. There is beauty in that. And also intensity.

A sense that many things are asking for space. For attention. For life. And part of this phase is learning to witness:

What is truly growing? What has strength? What is aligning with the direction of my soul?

Not everything needs to come with us.

If you are in this moment too, you might feel it:

A subtle upward movement. A soft pressure to shift. To clear. To strengthen. To choose differently. A curiosity of what is becoming. A bright awakening.

We do not need to know exactly what is emerging. And we do not need to force the bloom.

But perhaps we can begin to ask:

What in us is beginning to rise? What are we preparing for, even if we cannot yet name it? Where are we being asked to make space? What feels alive?

Mother of Emergence,
Guide what is lifting within us.
Teach us how to rise
while staying close to the Heart
Make us spacious enough
to welcome what we are becoming.

Spring is not only the season of blooming. It is the season of becoming able to bloom. And preparing ourselves to.

Take care of the rise.

with Fierce Love,

Linda Pappa

She is called Παναγία.

PANAGIA.
PAN = ALL, ABSOLUTE
AGIA = SAINT,HOLY

Named the absolute saint. The holy of Holies.

She has many faces. Each village seems to know her differently. Each island and landscape calls her by another name.

Panagia of the Mountain.
Panagia of the Sea.
Panagia the Tender.
Panagia the Protectress.
Panagia of the Cave.
Panagia the Milk-Giver.

Over the past years I have come to feel that these are not merely titles or variations, but living presences. Different expressions of the same vast Mother. Faces through which the divine feminine continues to speak.

I have felt the desire for some time now to begin writing about these Maries. Not as a historian, but as someone who listens. Gathering fragments and allowing them to pass through my own vessel. Letting them alchemize in the body before offering them back into words.

I feel a stirring to do so. As here in Greece, Mary does not appear as the softened image of pity or repression that many people in the West associate with her. She carries something far older.

A fierce tenderness. A presence that feels deeply connected to the lineage of the Mother Goddess and to the living body of the Earth itself. Perhaps this is why I have always felt drawn to her.

My grandmother was devoted to the Panagia. She even travelled to places of pilgrimage dedicated to her. My mother was named Maria, like so many women here in Greece.

For a long time she disliked her name. It felt too common. Way too ordinary. But eventually something shifted, and she began to sense its depth. Its history. Its hidden weight. And she reclaimed it.

There are endless things to say about this name.

MAR.
MARY.
MARIA.

Its origins remain mysterious. Some trace it to ancient Egyptian roots meaning beloved. Others connect it to myrrh, the fragrant resin used in sacred anointing and burial rituals. In Hebrew it can also mean bitterness, a reminder that motherhood itself carries both sweetness and suffering.

But there is another resonance that feels particularly alive here.

The syllable MAR echoes the word for Sea in many ancient languages. Mare. Mar. Mer. The great waters. The primordial ocean from which life emerges.

Maria, then, becomes a name that carries the depth of waters, the perfume of sacred resins, and the complexity of human love.

A name of the Mother.

Over the last few years I have wandered deeper into the Marian mysteries. Reading between the lines of doctrine, tracing forgotten symbols, and noticing how much of the ancient feminine still lives quietly within these traditions.

This series shall begin with one of her most intimate faces.

Panagia Galaktotrofousa.

The Milk-Giving Mother.

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After the stripped branches.
After the long inwardness.
After sitting with the Void in a dark bowl, with labdanum, dark honeycomb and hurricanes…

It finally began to loosen.

I didn’t realize how much the Void had settled into my bones until it softened.

There is a particular relief that comes when something has fully dissolved. Not dramatic relief. Just… softness. A long exhale. A sense that what needed to fall away has fallen.

What dissolved has done its work.
What was stripped away has made space.

And now, something begins to rise.

It’s not loud, but it’s undeniable.

The almond trees are blossoming, exploding with their message: eternal love. And so, the wheel continues to turn, as it always has …and always will.

The first crocuses emerge, like fallen stars returning to Earth.
Sap begins to rise. If you look closely at those naked branches, you will see they aren’t as dormant anymore. They are coming out of sleep, actively listening to a dream. A possibility of becoming.

In the mountains, it is the time of young lambs and baby goats.

It is therefore the time of milk.

After the dark comes this white tenderness.

Beneath the Earth.
Beneath tree bark.
Beneath skin.
Beneath fur…

The milky sap of the world rises as it is being newly born.

There is something almost imperceptible about this shift.

Winter does not end with a drum. It simply loosens its grip. And in that loosening, a current begins to flow.

It is full of nourishment. And it is white.

It’s not the harsh white of snow.
It’s the creamy white of milk.

Fluid. Soft. Intimate.

It feeds and mothers us. And it teaches us to mother.

This is the third gate of our Winter arc within Mother Liturgies.

After the Mother of the Hearth.
After the Mother of the Void.

The Mother of Milk.

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She has no mouth.
No ears.
No eyes.

She does not speak.
She does not listen.
She does not look outward.

As Carnival dissolves and the last meat is eaten, as the masks are removed and the music thins, she appears quietly in Greek homes — baked from bread, drawn on paper, shaped from clay.

Kyra Sarakosti.
Lady Lent.

I have known her for a while. And yet, only now do I feel I am beginning to understand her.

In Greece, the year does not turn abruptly. It spirals.

We move through Carnival (Aπόκριες) - a season of masks, excess, laughter, meat, inversion. It is ecstatic and slightly chaotic. The modern version of it is much more vulgar than I like. But it certainly shakes off winter’s stiffness… and it allows an experimental space where identity can be undone.

Then comes Kathara Deftera: Clean Monday.

The sky opens. We go outside. We fly kites. We eat lagána. A flat bread without yeast, sprinkled in golden sesame seeds. We begin the fast. The gesture is upward. The wind lifts us closer to heaven.

Beneath this open sky, Kyra Sarakosti begins her quiet work. She is both the symbol and the guardian of the time of the lent.

A lent that lasts seven weeks. Seven - the number of completion, of time fulfilled. Seven days of creation. Seven visible planets. Seven seals. Seven sorrows. Seven notes. Seven chakras.

Seven legs.

Each week, one is removed. She is a living calendar. A body counting time. Through her, time is embodied and diminished.

We move closer to Easter (to resurrection) not through expansion, but through subtraction.

Carnival empties us through excess.
Lent empties us through restraint.

Somewhere in the process, the field becomes clearer.

Kyra Sarakosti is not a figure of official theology. She belongs to the folk imagination. To village kitchens. To hands shaping dough. And she feels much older than the Church.

The people who lived close to the land have always practiced some form of spring purification. Before planting comes clearing. Before blossoming comes fasting. Before birth comes narrowing.

Christianity did not invent this rhythm. It sanctified it.

In Greece, Orthodoxy never fully severed from the land. It grew over it, like a chapel built beside an olive tree whose roots predate the altar.

Kyra Sarakosti stands there in that crack between the chapel and the soil.

She is not glamorous. She is contained and almost monastic.

Her closed mouth is fasting.
Her closed ears are protection from gossip and noise.
Her closed eyes are watchfulness.

She practices what the desert monks called hesychia: inner stillness.

It’s not repression. It’s conservation.

This year, I feel her more strongly than ever.

The days are already lengthening. Something is stirring. Ideas are arriving very quickly. Messages, invitations, possibilities. Life is accelerating. And yet my body longs for silence.

I do not wish to withdraw from Love. But I feel a strong desire to stay centered in the expansion. To clear the noise so I can hear what’s truly resonating.

If we enter spring scattered, we bloom chaotically.
If we enter it purified, we can bloom with direction.

Lent, at its core, is not about guilt. It is about orientation.

It asks:

What are you consuming?
What is consuming you?
What needs to grow quiet so something holy can emerge?

Kyra Sarakosti closes her senses not because the world is bad, but because energy is precious.

Seen through the body, the sequence is brilliant.

Carnival allows release. Clean Monday lifts the gaze.
Lent narrows the field. Easter awakens the light.

Ecstasy → Clarity → Restraint → Resurrection.

The nervous system is guided through a complete circle.

Without Carnival, we are rigid.
Without Lent, we are dissipated.
Without Easter, we forget why we purified ourselves at all.

This is seasonal intelligence.

And one does not need to be Christian to recognize it.

Perhaps Lent is simply the art of entering spring without scattering ourselves.

Kyra Sarakosti closes her mouth, her ears, her eyes. Not in rejection of the world, but in devotion to what is about to be born. That is both fierce and so profoundly tender.

If you wish to keep company with her, you might begin very quietly. Shape her from dough. Let her stand somewhere in your home as a reminder that time is embodied, that it passes through you week by week. You might choose one small subtraction weekly. Less noise. Fewer words. Less coffee, more rest. Less scrolling, more emptiness. A softened appetite for distraction. Not from guilt. From clarity.

Before blossom, the tree draws its sap. Before song, the bird gathers its breath. These weeks are not about punishment, but about gathering.

Each year she returns.

She does not demand belief. She’s just patiently doing her thing. Simply standing at the edge of spring and waiting for us to arrive lighter.

Whether you call it Easter, resurrection, or simply emergence…

Something in us all is preparing to rise.

With Fierce Love

x

Linda Pappa

ps.: If you enjoyed this piece, I warmly invite you to share the resonance or leave a comment. It always means a lot to receive.

This archive will continue to unfold seasonally.
Paid members help sustain this work.

As I prepare to leave, I’m re-reading a journal entry from February 2024. Written after a pilgrimage by the sea.

I’m sharing it now because the Dragon Mother has not loosened her grip. If anything, she has made herself clearer.

“Just returned from another pilgrimage, this time on land by the sea.

I met the woman who shook and triggered me a few days ago. She actually invited me. She said she wanted to show me a mermaid temple. Somehow I knew she wasn’t talking about pretty mermaids, but something far more ancient. She felt it was important for me to meet it.

How incredible of a gift. To be seen so clearly, to be met at the level of the soul, beyond discomfort. To trust the voice beyond friction.

We walked through the forest of pine trees. The Holy Fathers.

We arrived by the cliff. I saw her immediately from above. A Mother Dragon.

The tide was low; her open curves were exposed like pools. Teeming with life.

We descended from the cliff. I warned her, I’m scared of heights. She took my heavy bag and answered: “I got you”.

We arrived on top of a rock and made our way to the entrance. A split between two rocks. A passage.

Crevices everywhere. Sanctuaries. In every hole, a being: a crab, a sea urchin, a mussel, coral.

On her skin: barnacles, blackness, sharp and oxidized black lines and grids, connecting to one another like a nervous system.

What happened in her Presence caused time to stretch. There was dancing. Inner and outer singing. Inner and outer sounds and movements.

We offered our voices. We offered herbs. She spoke with us, asking what she needed, what we needed. We took care of each other.

I blew smoke into her empty cavities, knowing that I was filling mine as well.

A symbol I had drawn for a friend fell three times into her waters. She wanted to keep it. I worried I was disturbing something, but she reassured me:

”You are not disturbing. You are so welcome. You are so allowed.”

A primordial current pulsed through our bodies. The language of the ocean’s core. Wild, free, untamed. It spoke from within.

My friend began to bleed, releasing her moon blood into the salt water. Blessing herself.

We laughed in exhilaration. Seagulls flew above us, guarding. Keeping us safe in our playground.

We are home with our Mother.

On the way back, all I could think about were dragons. Reptiles. The primordial force residing in my body, in my cells, in my womb. A force I know. A force I am working with. A force that flows through.

When I arrived home and searched for my keys, a lizard crawled into the sleeve of my black shirt. I smiled and removed the shirt carefully. I wanted to meet him through closeness, not surprise tickles. He was calm and playful, like any baby dragon should be.

We spent time together. I held him between my hands. He moved, then stood still, trusting. Only when I touched his sensitive tail did he begin to move again.

He ran behind the black wood stove and into my black socks. He likes the color black, just like our mother earlier.

Dragons like black.
I do too. So do many of my wise sisters.

As I left the house, I found a snakeskin on my path. The skin of a baby snake. Once more, a reptile sharing its language. Actively uncanny.

The Dragon Mother is not letting me go.
She is only welcoming me in. Holding me tight.

I sat to share these stories with my beloved.

He was astonished, then he showed me something: an ancient dragon skeleton had just been unearthed on the other side of the world.

The Dragon Mother is alive and well.”

I return to Her.

x

Linda

I did not go looking for Her.

She came through loss. Through collapse.
Through nights when the ground would not hold. Days when the sky itself seemed to turn against us. Through hurricanes - inner and outer - that stripped away language, plans, futures, and the comforting illusion of continuity.

Lately, I have met Her in very real ways.
Brutally embodied.

There will be more to say about this. About love, devastation, and the strange mercy that lives inside undoing. That will come soon.

For now, I want to speak of who She is, and what it has meant to recognize Her presence. Not as a concept. But as a living, breathing field of intelligence.

Who is she?

She is the Mother before the Mother.

Read this again. Let it sink in.

Everything we know that exists has been given a name.
She is what existed before Mother.
Before you.
Before me.

Before form.
Before answers.

Before “Mother” was ever given a name,
there was Her.

She is the vastness before birth.
The darkness from which all things arise.
The unnameable womb of existence itself.

She is the place we come from
and the place we return to
long before we learn to call ourselves anything at all.

In a world that is constantly asking us to define ourselves,
to label our experiences,
to know where we are going,
to explain what is happening,
to make meaning quickly, efficiently,
and in words that can be shared,

the Mother of the Void is radically uncooperative.

She does not offer answers.
She does not give reassurance.
She does not pack the mystery into something digestible.

Instead, She teaches us how to stay.

How to remain present inside the not-knowing.
How to soften when the mind is grasping for certainty.
How to breathe when there is nothing to hold onto.

She teaches us that the unknown is not a mistake.
It is the original condition of life.

The Mother of the Void is not absence.

She is not lack. She is not the empty space left behind when something is taken from us.

To sit with Her is to feel the deep undoing
of the modern reflex to control, to name, to stabilize.

To sit with Her is to feel how much of our exhaustion
comes from pretending we know more than we do.

The Mother of the Void does not demand faith.
She demands surrender.

Not the passive kind.
The fierce, embodied surrender
that allows us to stop fighting reality as it is.

In prayer, in transmission,
in the liturgies that have unfolded around Her,
what has come through again and again is this:

She is endless.
She is patient.
She is unimaginably intimate.

She holds galaxies and grief
with the same quiet steadiness.
She makes room for terror and tenderness
without asking either of them to leave.

To connect with Her
is to remember that we are not small.

That our lives are not isolated events, cut off from source.
That even in moments of total disorientation,
we are still held
inside something vast, ancient,
and profoundly alive.

She reminds us where we come from.

Not from achievement.
Not from identity.
Not from story.

But from infinity.

From a darkness that is not opposed to light,
but gives birth to it.
From a silence that is not empty,
but listening.

In this way,
the Mother of the Void is not an escape from the world.

She is a teacher for living inside it.
Especially when the world is burning,
breaking,
or asking the impossible of us.

She teaches us how to let life move through us
without demanding that it make sense first.
How to trust the intelligence of what is forming,
even when we cannot yet see its shape.

To walk with Her
is to release the need to be ahead of ourselves.

And perhaps this is Her greatest gift:

She gives us permission
to not know
who we are becoming.

And to love ourselves anyway.

x

Linda Pappa

On the Solstice, we started to journey with our liturgies devoted to the different faces of the Mother.

During our first liturgy, the Mother of the Hearth, something moved with great intimacy. The space was luminous in a way that only happens when people gather without urgency. When there is time to tend, to listen, to stay. What emerged was not loud, but radiant… and deeply nourishing.

Like sitting close to a fire that has been burning for a long time.

It feels especially potent to connect to this energy now, in the darkest days of the year. When the light withdraws. When the world becomes quieter. When the body asks for warmth that is not only physical.

This is Hearth-time. It’s Her time.

For me, this connection has not been abstract.

I have been walking through grief. I have lost someone I loved deeply, and shortly after, David’s father passed away. In these weeks, I have felt a treacherous cold beyond winter. The kind of brutal stillness that comes when loss arrives.

During a few days when David was away, I was alone in the house, in the coldest days of the season. I found myself collecting kindling, learning how to make the fire properly, tending it not as a ritual, but out of necessity. To warm my hands. To warm the room. To warm myself when my heart felt especially cold.

It wasn’t easy. The wood was wet. The first couple of days, I did not succeed in lighting and keeping a fire. The process reflected my pain.

And then… I slowed down to listen to what the Mother of the Hearth was really asking. Presence with what is. The fire came to life. At that moment, something landed.

The simple act of tending the fire, of staying with it, feeding it, learning its rhythm - connected me to an energy that feels ancient and uninterrupted.

An energy that does not deny grief, but holds it. That does not rush healing, but remains present. A reminder that life continues as long as something is kept alive. As long as a flame is tended.

This is what the Mother of the Hearth has been teaching me.

Not transcendence. But continuity.

An ongoing love. An ongoing warmth. An ongoing flame.

This piece is written from within that experience. It arises from Mother Liturgies, and from the very real work of keeping a fire alive (outside and within) during a season of loss.

What follows is not instruction.
It is remembrance.

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A few nights ago, on Christmas Eve, we were speaking with my father. David’s father had just passed away. There has been a lot of loss moving through our family, and grief rearranges the way conversations unfold.

My father spoke about David’s dad’s life. About how he came from very little, built a family, raised children. A life that could be called worthwhile. He then reflected on people he knows who, in his words, “did not do much with their lives.” No children. No clear path. No visible achievements. He wondered what it must feel like to reach the end carrying regret.

At the time, we nodded. The thought passed easily between us.
But it stayed with me.

When I sit with questions of purpose, it feels like opening an atrium inside the mind. A wide, echoing space with many doors.

One door opens onto the vastness of time and consciousness. Against that scale, the urgency of purpose collapses. We live for a brief flicker inside something immeasurable. Why, then, are we so tense about meaning? Why do we grip it so tightly?

Another door opens onto something else entirely, the web of relation that holds us. From the moment we are born until the moment we die, we are witnessed. By neighbors, classmates, strangers we pass in the street.

Thousands of people experience us, our presence, our voice, our way of moving through the world. Even quietly, we are registered. Remembered. Carried.

Is that not, already, a life lived?

Purpose is such a charged word. It promises direction. It tells us where to place our energy. But it is also deeply subjective, and often anxious.

I notice how often we feel compelled to explain ourselves, to justify why we think the way we think, why we live the way we live. How much time we spend hoping to be validated for our orientation toward life.

Carl Jung spoke of an existential wound. The wound of not being allowed to simply exist.

When I first encountered that idea, something in me loosened.

What if we were allowed to exist without explanation? What if there were a place where our being was already enough?

Sometimes I imagine that place as the Mother’s arms.

A Presence that does not ask for proof.
A Love that does not measure, compare, or require direction.
A Remembering that we were welcomed here before we learned how to justify ourselves.

If that wound were healed, even slightly, would we be so obsessed with purpose? Would feeling lost feel like a failure, or simply like part of being alive?

David shared one of his wishes for the coming year with me, to simply be. To exist without worry. Without having to be something in particular.

It struck me as a kind of freedom I rarely allow myself.

Because if I’m honest, I recognize myself in this obsession. I often find myself at tables, explaining my worldview, my devotions, my work, as if I am making a case for my existence.

Sometimes I look at what I do and feel a quiet sadness, sensing how much of it has been shaped by the need to justify being here at all. Or by the pressure to fulfill what others imagine my purpose should be.

I don’t have a resolution to this. Only a growing curiosity about ways of living that do not require constant narration. Taoist thought comes to mind.

The refusal to force meaning.
The trust in movement without explanation.
The sense that usefulness is not the measure of aliveness.

For now, I’m staying with the question. Letting it soften something in me. Letting the idea of simply existing, without defense, feel a little more possible.

What if that was enough?

x
Linda

Have you ever watched something die? Do you look away or do you let yourself be curious?

I’ve always found it fascinating to observe what happens at the end of a life cycle. Be it that of a plant, of an animal, human, or simply - of a layer of identity. When that which was identified and recogniseable as “something” - melts into the Earth, leaving only its sacred scaffolding: the bones. The last form still singing long after the rest has returned to The Mother.

The bones. If they could sing, what would they sing?

When we look at bones alone, we cannot identify a person. Only a structure. A sacred geometry that gives our life its form. Over the bones is built flesh, breath, life force, awareness, identity, expression.

The bones hold it all. Witness it all. And then, when everything else is gone, they are what remains. Pure white, mineral, made of calcium, like limestone. The ancient body of the Earth.

Have you been feeling this sacred undoing? The raw moment of the year, when we are being asked to strip naked and let it all go?

The bones are speaking. There’s something so holy about this time. It’s the moment we can finally remember what holds us up from within. To meet the holy essence.

Yet before we do, the little layers of energetic flesh and identity must be released. All the titles, the projections, the expectations. All the soft tissues of illusion.

There can be resistance to this process. It’s normal. We cling to what has kept us safe. Defined.

The word illusion may also sting at first. It’s sharp like a blade.

But even as we resist, the sacred undoing happens on its own.

Like clothes we have outgrown,
these layers begin to feel tight, uncomfortable,
and the shedding begins.

Stripping off the non-essential.
Revealing what is absolutely vital.
The song of the bones beneath the flesh.

Savour it.

Bone is remembrance.
Bone is ancestry.
Bone is Truth that cannot be faked.

Mother of the Bones,
Keeper of the Hidden Structure

You who lives beneath the soft decay,
You who hold what remains when all else falls away

Teach us to rest into Truth.
Teach us the strength of stillness.

Let us remember what cannot be taken,
the architecture of soul inside the frame of form.

May our bodies become temples of quiet knowing.
May we feed the marrow with soft attention.
May the brittle parts soften in your hands.

Through you, we remember
that death is never the end -
only the deep sleep of transformation.

Mother of the Bones,
We become quiet enough
to hear your voice.

NOURISHING THE BONES

Other than simply holding the sacred process of undoing in our awareness - here are some simple practices to feed our inner architecture during this time of the year.

• SIPPING BONE BROTH. Revitalizing from within. I thank the wonderful women who joined this year’s Holy Ground for inspiring me + reminding me of this ancestral form of nourishment.

• NETTLE INFUSIONS. A large handful in a liter of hot water. The most remineralising + strengthening brew. You can sip all day long and for as long as you need. And when you meet Nettle in meditation: absolute grandmother energy. A beautifully protective presence to be with.

• TOUCHING THE BONES BENEATH THE SKIN. Remembering that which is holding us. Reflecting on what “support” means.

• LAYING ON THE EARTH. Pressing our spine against soil or stone. Consecrating our physicality. Recalibrating our field and grounding any nervousness about the process find ourselves in.

Nothing superficial will survive this season.
Only what is essential.

So may our bones be well-fed, well-held, well-listened to.
And may we find strength in our structure.
Softness in our becoming.

with Fierce Love

Linda Pappa

I’m bringing it back today, and keeping it accessible for my paid subscribers. A gentle return. A remembrance.
A way to continue honouring the depth of this space.

Below, you’ll find the original text that opens the meditation. An invitation to slow your breath and let the rain work its medicine through your body. And for those of you in the inner circle, you’ll also find the guided audio: ten minutes of my voice woven with a soundscape David and I recorded as the rain fell around our home.

Prepare a soft place to lie down, dim the light, and let the water take you.

THE GIFT OF RAIN

What comes into your awareness, when you imagine rain?

Do you hear the sound of it? Is it soft or complex? Do you feel the wetness? Do you smell its scent? Do you see dark winter skies or tropical forests?

The Rain has a very sensual cleansing presence.
A bold one even when she pours softly.

I like to imagine how the Earth and the plants must feel, when the rain comes - especially after a very active and hot summer. There has been so much activity, so much pressure to grow, so much energy pulled upwards. The plants have been straining and straining, pushing and pushing, soaking up all the energy they possibly can, to keep going. Absorbing all of the sun’s energy. Pulling water with so much effort, from deep within in the soil.

And then something changes. A gift of abundant water arrives from the heavens. The earth soaks it all in. The plants drink it all up. And all of this water makes its way into the lives of all living things, becoming our sustenance.

The rain appears unexpectedly, just as we might have been making other plans, in the momentum of our active existence. “It is time to pause”, she says.

“It is time to receive. Let me rinse off your expectations. Let me lessen the many things on your mind. Let me lighten the many burdens on your shoulders. Let me cleanse you, right here, right now. Let me give you the Water you need”

And so we are invited to let go. To surrender and retreat in introspection. To allow ourselves to receive and drink this nourishing water with our souls.

A RAIN MEDITATION FOR SURRENDERING DEEPLY

My partner David and I are grateful to bring you this really soothing meditation, featuring a soothing soundscape of real rain sounds that we recorded, accompanied by soft musical notes. You’ll be guided by my voice and the sounds of the rain, gently directing your awareness to your body and finding your ultimate place of rest.

Paid subscribers will find the guided meditation in the audio player below. Ten minutes of my voice woven with rain and soft notes recorded with David. Thank you for supporting the deeper weaving of this work.

The meditation lasts about 10 minutes. To enjoy it most fully, I invite you to prepare your space first.

Choose a place where you can lie down undisturbed.
Gather blankets and pillows or rest directly on your bed.
Dim the light. Quiet the room.
And when you’re ready… tune in.

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Touch is our first language and perhaps our last.
Before we learned to speak, we listened through skin.

This piece traces the intelligence of the hands: those ancient instruments that remember what the mind forgets. A summary of of what has felt fiercely alive for me these days as a student of this body and daughter of this Earth.

May it land as a clear reminder of what it truly means to touch, and to be touched.

I. THE ACHE AND LONGING

A few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me a mystical and slightly cryptic message. It was an invitation to sit in ceremony with a plant teacher that I hadn’t yet met. I am not one to collect these experiences and prefer to listen closely. Cue by cue, I felt the plant call me closer and closer. So I prepared myself and went to take part in this strange night-long prayer.

It was a very, very long night. Confronting it was. Uncomfortable it was, also. My body didn’t have a lot of fun being there and neither did my psyche - but of course, I later realized that is part of the process.

There were two things I really wanted. One, was to leave the circle and to sit under a tree. The other, was to touch and be touched. It was unbearable and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

For some reason, my mouth felt shut. I couldn’t summon the courage to speak of this need. It only came out later, when I was given a more explicit permission to speak in a sharing circle, while looking at the fire.

It started as a personal transmission on Touch. It later morphed into a cry from the heart of the collective soul. A series of open questions I desired to have answers to.

Why is our communication so focused on words, when our hands can say a thousand things?

How do we remember touch?

How do we reclaim it, when it has been vastly distorted and misunderstood?

Isn’t touch what will remind us that we belong to the Earth and to each other?

It felt extremely vulnerable to let these words pour out of my mouth - but it had to be this way. I knew there was a deeper something to understand here.

Days passed. I touched many things. The wild clay I gathered and processed for the immersion I was going to hold. The sourdough I stretched and baked into rye bread and focaccia. The herbs I collected, dried and crumbled for tea.

I touched things softly and slowly. I also touched things brutally and carnally - like when I crushed grapes with my bare hands. Or when I crushed walnut hulls with a rock, to make into ink.

Somewhere in this process, I was touched too. The clay covered my hands. The sourdough stuck to my fingers. The herbs left their scent. The grapes left their sticky juice. The walnut hulls stained my skin.

More than ever, I could notice it. Whatever I touched - it touched me in return. As if saying: Thank you for your Presence. Thank you for allowing yourself to be touched.

Somewhere in between these humble acts I remembered that Touch was our first language, before the tongue learned words. It was how we once prayed: with our palms, not petitions.

II. WHAT CLAY REMEMBERS

Days later, during our immersion, Touch became the prayer itself.

We worked with these beautiful clays I had gathered for us. Not just as material, but as memory and living intelligence. We closed our eyes, focused on sensation and let the hands lead. The more we surrendered to touch, the more the clay began to speak. Her temperature, her texture, her pulse - all of it carried messages.

At one point, we experimented with a shared practice of passing a single mound of clay from hand to hand. Each woman met it with her own touch. She pressed. She shaped. She breathed something of herself into it.

When the clay returned to her, it was transformed. Not in a completely changed way, but in a way that was rendered crystal clear. It was as if the others had listened through their palms and reflected her essence back in a language beyond words.

Something profound was happening: touch had become a transmitter, a living oracle.

It revealed what sight could never grasp. It reminded us that the hands do not simply make. They translate the invisible.

On the final day, as we sat in the sun for our closing prayer, one woman turned to the group and said softly, “HOW AMAZING IT IS TO HAVE HANDS!”

That sentence landed like a revelation and felt like a buzz in the air. Because yes, hands are ancient devices. They are how spirit learns to touch the world.

Below: More revelations. Grapes crushed into juice. Ancient mosaics in a healing temple. The hands remembering themselves as innate technology. Come, cross the threshold…

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Grapes. In their bursting skins live both sweetness and rot, ecstasy and grief. They carry the mysteries of Autumn.

Today I felt the first real caress of Fall. The cicadas have grown quiet, yet the wind is loud. And while the village is not yet smelling of wood burning smoke, I noticed our plum tree has been stripped off its leaves. Once again, it lies bare. Brutally naked.

Today I went to the market. The air was cool enough to wear my beloved turkish jacket. To wrap this bare skin in some extra protection. To hide a little bit more - and be a little more of a walking secret. Adorned with wool and red floral embroideries.

Today I spoke to the Mother aloud. I asked for support in integration of what has been revealed thus far. I also asked for forgiveness and aid to grief all of what has not been as I expected, what caused pain, confusion, anxiety, torment. What has not yet ripened. And what might never ripen. A confession that initially felt heavy, later felt like a release. A liberation. Suddenly I felt lighter.

Today I had my afternoon coffee warm, without ice-cubes. I took my cup with me to the studio, to have few sips in between sculpting clay. I wondered what I might do after I am done with this task. After this cup is empty. The guidance was clear: I will rest. I will stop pushing. I will follow the call to the mysteries.

Today my beloved neighbour and sweet friend, Katerina - gave me a bottle of Moύστος (“moustos”). Grape must, or in other words - grape juice. It was gifted to her by other neighbors that tend to vineyards. She told me to boil it a bit. To put a small bundle of ashes into the pot so that the impurities can be cleaned in the boiling process. Then it can be used for baking. To make μουστοκούλουρα (“moustokouloura”) - spiced grape must cookies.

I had gone through a similar process a few weeks prior. A longer one, turning grape juice into syrup - using the grapes that were growing in my patio. I boiled it for hours and hours. Watching the liquid darken, sweeten, thicken. It felt like tending to a secret, like coaxing the soul of the grape to reveal itself. What remained at the end was no longer simply juice, but a medicine. A nectar. Πετιμεζι (“Petimezi” - grape must syrup).

When one receives the gift of grape juice, there are two ways forward. Fermentation. Or concentration.

Both require time, both require patience. One asks us to surrender to mystery. Allowing invisible forces to transform sweetness into intoxication. The other asks us to endure the fire, to withstand the slow heat of boiling down until only essence is left.

This is the alchemy of Fall. What has ripened must now change form. What was once lush and abundant is pressed, strained, purified, and stripped. Even the grape must pass through death to become wine. Our joys, our griefs, our dreams must undergo the same.

Over the past few years, grapes have become quiet companions in my life. They grew wild around my house, just like the Roses, teaching me through their abundance and their mess, their sweetness and their rot.

Last year I made wine from them for the first time — watching the skins bubble, the juice alive with invisible life. A couple of years ago I even co-held a meditation with wine as the medium, letting it become a bridge between Earth and mystery.

This thread runs deeper than I once realized.

My family comes from Samos, an island long known for its vineyards and muscat wine. When I finally returned there, the timing was uncanny. Ιt was harvest season. Grapes were everywhere — carried in baskets, drying on rooftops, spread across patios to become raisins and sweet nectar. It felt as though the land itself was reminding me that this fruit, this medicine, runs in my blood.

Grapes have a way of pulling us into their cycle, inviting us to remember that transformation is never linear. Juice can become syrup, wine, vinegar, or simply rot into the soil. Each path carries a teaching. Each path asks us to see what is ready to ferment, what is ready to be boiled down, what is ready to return to the Earth.

Our ancestors, of course, knew this well. Grapes weren’t just fruit. They were portals. In their bursting skins lived the promise of both ecstasy and grief, life and death entwined.

Wine was always the blood of the Earth herself — divine intoxication flowing through mortal veins. To drink it was to touch Dionysus, who dissolves boundaries, who teaches that joy and sorrow are twins, that rapture and mourning are one.

Every harvest festival carried this double edge: celebration of abundance, yes, but also acknowledgment that the fruit is dying, that its sweetness cannot last in its raw form. It must be crushed, fermented, transfigured.

Grapes remind us that transformation is not polite or tidy. It stains the hands, it makes a mess, it ferments with wildness, it asks us to lose control and trust what we cannot see.

It invites us into surrender, into the knowing that what dies will also feed life. That what rots may yet become nectar.

The Earth stands as witness, mother, tomb - holding it all. She takes in the fallen grapes in her alchemical mouth, the skins left behind after pressing, the seeds that may never sprout. Nothing is wasted. Through her pores, this sweetness, this rot, this sourness, this silence — all of it becomes food for the next cycle. Every harvest carries this paradox: that abundance always walks hand in hand with letting go.

Autumn teaches us this more clearly than any other season. It is a time of digestion, integration and composting.

A time to ask ourselves: What in me is fermenting quietly, awaiting its moment of revelation? What is asking to be boiled down, made simpler, stronger, more essential? What is ready to fall back into the soil, to be released as nourishment for something that I haven’t seen or felt just yet? That I don’t yet know?

Perhaps this is why grapes continue to visit, year after year, as teacher and mirror. They remind us that transformation is not something to force but something to allow — by offering what is ripe. Trusting the mystery of what comes next. Surrendering to the cycle that has always carried us home.

May this season bring you your own medicine, whether through sweetness or through fermentation, whether through fire or through absolute surrender. May you taste the nectar of what remains, and may you rest in the knowing that nothing is ever truly lost.

With Fierce Love,

Linda Pappa