Restoring Light into our Home

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." ~ Abraham Lincoln

I have fond memories of marching down Fifth Avenue in the Greek Independence Day Parade as a young girl. My small feet moved in rhythm with something much older than I could understand at the time. I was a first-generation daughter whose immigrant parents’ lives were shaped by the violence of the Greek Civil War.

In our home, being Greek meant remembering and honoring our father's diasporic journey, who courageously traveled so far to give us a better life. We learned to be independent through the myths that explained our emotions, to respect our ancient heritage, and to see freedom as something precious and hard-earned - something to cherish and hold close to our hearts.

Still, there was always an unspoken resilience that our people had shown in enduring centuries of Ottoman rule. Even in recent times, from 1913 to 1923, the Ottomans targeted Greek populations in Pontus, Anatolia, Ionia, and Eastern Thrace. It is estimated that between 300,000 and 1,200,000 Greeks were killed in massacres, forced marches, and labor camps.

For us, history was never distant. Although the beautiful people of modern Turkey are no longer viewed as enemies, we nevertheless carried this with us and treated it with great care here in our new home in the U.S., free from fearful mindsets and free to express this independence.

One year that particularly stands out in my memory is 1977. I was dressed as Hellas (meaning Greece - the land of light), which was more a symbol than a costume, walking beside my cousins, who wore the traditional foustanella of the tsoliades. My father walked somewhere behind us, watchful and steady, always close by.

When the parade ended, we started our usual walk back, ten blocks through the city, still feeling the afterglow of music, pride, and pageantry. Then, suddenly, something changed. A group of men approached us.

Their faces were hard. Their gestures were sharp. They spat toward us.

I sensed something I hadn’t experienced before: hate. My heart raced, and I became acutely aware of the colors of my sash and the strange weight of my costume. My father said nothing, but I remember how he looked at them: calm, direct, and steady. We kept walking.

Silence carried us the rest of the way, and it wasn’t until we were back in the car, crossing the familiar arc of the George Washington Bridge, that I finally asked: “Baba… why were those men so angry?” He told me that hate is something that, when it takes root, is hard to understand, that we must forgive this fearful conduct, and we left it at that.

As I grew older, I began to understand the deeper feelings and history behind that moment. In 1974, tensions between Greece and Turkey grew quickly when Turkey invaded Cyprus. The invasion was tied to Cold War politics and involved the use of U.S.-supplied weapons, which were controversial because all nations were in NATO.

This event deeply affected families like mine, who felt the weight of betrayal. For many in the Greek diaspora, it was not just distant policy. News of the invasion reached us right away, and I remember my parents worrying as they watched the news and spoke quietly at night.

I was seven when our family chartered a bus with other Greeks to march on Washington that year in August 18, 1974. Though I didn't understand then, we joined many others calling for justice and remembrance.

Protests happened across the country, touching every Greek home and heart.

These are the memories that are passed down through generations, shaping identity, grief, and resilience. And still, alongside all of this, something else remains— a lineage often associated with light, the sun, illumination, and the land's people. This is what we carried too—the enlightenment of remembering that this happened a long time ago, and the realization that in the absence of love, fear can easily take root.

Being human means no one escapes history — at some point, every family experiences hardship, violence, and loss of freedom and dignity. We only need to remember that we all come from somewhere ... only the indigenous peoples who steward this land have the right to speak for it, the way only the individual has the right to speak for the body that carries this life.

History flows just beneath our skin, and when we forget, fear often lingers just below our breath, right before we say or do something hard or unkind - something that harms our fellow brother or sister.

In our culture, as in many others, there is a tradition of Philoxenia—welcoming a stranger into our home (as Penelope did with Odysseus) and meeting their needs before asking for their name (religion, nationality, work), what they have, or where they come from. And, when we feel safe in this house of light, that's when the magic happens ... when resilience, heritage, wisdom, and dignity are shared as a halo that includes all, not only a few.

Remembering where we come from is a celebration; to remember isn’t to harden, but to hold rather than grip - to honor our origins rather than forget the journey, and to choose, again and again, how we meet others now in light of how we met them before — independent of fearful thought and free to respond in love.

Freedom exists in the moments before our words or actions. "And, we must never forget that the highest appreciation (of that freedom) is not to utter words, but to live by them."
~ JFK

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Namaste!

I'm so grateful for your presence, and for the ways you show up that help me to remember Love. As human beings, we find it so hard to remember the spirit that guides this heart. The truth is that there is no real security in who we think we are because, by the nature of all things, we are constantly changing. This illusion can trap us — the illusion that we are special or chosen, that God loves X people more than Y people, or that one ideology is superior to another — that R is more correct than D — becomes the reason that makes our reality true.

When we buy into this, our minds become torn.

Krishnamurti said, "In attachment, we try to find security. And when you don't find it in a particular attachment, you try to find it in another attachment. Your mind is playing tricks on you all the time. This is called Love."

We find comfort in what we believe, in the models that often keep us chained to guilt —for instance, that we will be saved by some external source—but we overlook the truth that being saved means recognizing that the person in front of you, whom you hate, think is inferior, or label as undesirable, is actually a manifestation of God, or an aspect of yourself that you have already experienced. If you can remember this life separate from these beliefs, desires, fears, and constructs, and if you can open your heart to this possibility, then you will finally be free.

And in this place Rumi mentions, "beyond the ideas of wrong doing and right doing," is where we will meet. 

Blessings.🪷