About Anoíxe Means Open

In 1968, hitchhiking through Europe on my way to India, I came to Greece for the first time. I spent a perfect summer there, floating in the Aegean, dancing in the tavernas, sleeping in fields, caves, on rooftops, and in youth hostels. I fell in love with the place and its people, with the pastoral world and the ancient ways that had barely been disturbed by an industrial age. A few years later I felt a strong need to return, and then Greece was where I kept coming back to. Over the next four decades I continuously returned, despite difficulties, time and time again, homing in to a Greek island and the family there that had somehow become my own.

I try to tell the story of my time in Greece both as a traveler and through the eyes of my adopted Greek family. Because the ancient world still feels alive there, I let the mythology of that time parallel my own arrivals and departures. Looking through the windowpane on eternity that is Greece, while the years pass and the country, the family, and I change, it’s always clear that something older than time stays the same.

Anoíxi Means Open is a lyrical memoir in the tradition of Isak Dinesan’s Out of Africa and M.F.K. Fisher’s writings of France. My love song to Greece, both ancient and modern, it’s a story of homecoming, of worlds connecting and dissolving, and of an internal life that finds its harmony with an outer place and time.