{"id":1517,"date":"2017-08-13T14:07:07","date_gmt":"2017-08-13T14:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=1517"},"modified":"2017-08-13T14:15:02","modified_gmt":"2017-08-13T14:15:02","slug":"blue-cosmos-greek-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=1517","title":{"rendered":"Blue Cosmos, Greek Style"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Struck by the linear perfection and balance of the Acropolis, a literary observer noted how nervous the ancient Greeks must have been – how high strung, highly sensitive, neurotic. \u00a0They were delicate and high maintenance, thus the ancient Greeks quested, they built and calmed themselves with high aesthetic achievement.\u00a0 They conquered chaos through beauty and order (cosmos).<\/p>\n

Traveling through Greece, I think about how elusive that balance is.\u00a0 Greece is straddling, struggling, highly sensitive to its lack of balance and desperate to find some poised ground.<\/p>\n

Greece is poised between many things – Western Europe and the Levant, American business and Russian orthodoxy, the market and the common good, the sensual and the ascetic.\u00a0 The eagle symbol of the Byzantine Empire, which Greece was a part of for twelve centuries, faced both east and west, and Byzantine means something tangled and intertwined.<\/p>\n

There are stony cities which are unforgiving in the heat and current economic crisis.\u00a0 They feel closer to Cairo or Tunis, with patriarchal families calling the shots.\u00a0 There are gentle villages and old women dressed in black and vast olive groves. \u00a0Picturesque white-washed villas and perched domed churches \u00a0and truckloads of sheep. \u00a0There is the sea – consoling, for everyone, the public good. \u00a0It’s possible that the azure blue beauty of the sea provides Greeks with their good humor and kindness. \u00a0It calms their high-strung nervous systems naturally.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Struck by the linear perfection and balance of the Acropolis, a literary observer noted how nervous the ancient Greeks must have been – how high strung, highly sensitive, neurotic. \u00a0They were delicate and high maintenance, thus the ancient Greeks quested, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[610,607,606,611,605,609,608,612,277],"class_list":["post-1517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-athens","tag-chaos","tag-cosmos","tag-eastern-orthodoxy","tag-greece","tag-modern-greece","tag-ouranopoli","tag-summer-2017","tag-travel-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-ot","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1517"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1527,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions\/1527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}