I HAVE ALWAYS cherished the love and comfort of a good woman. Perhaps that made me whole as a person because a man’s life without the love of another human being is spiritually empty and incomplete.
I had the most beautiful and gifted women and it was the women in my life that drove me, inspired my growth and nourished compassion for life. Living for all humans is filled with both joy and heartbreak, and like the yin and yang of Zen, is intertwined with so many stories and dramas that I have a few of my own to share.
I have been living in glorious Greece for the past thirty-four years in a sort of self-imposed exile. Not a bad for a choice of bohemian living either. Leonard Cohen made a similar decision in the early 1960s to leave New York to live on a Greek island for a number of years and from it launched a major singing career.
Over the years I have seen quite a bit of this wild, capricious world and observed pointedly what effect living in a distant country can do to foreigners. Some did well in adapting to the new culture and lifestyles, while others slowly decayed, went downhill and perished into oblivion. They either went back home or and faded away unable make the change.
As for myself, I chose the outlaw path and followed it throughout most of my life. In retrospect I found I wanted a safe space to create and find some respite in this chaotic world. Most important of all, I wanted a safe place to create in some semblance of peace and harmony, and for me, Greece was the ticket.
After travels to Europe, India and the Far East, I gradually became a self-realized person who has gone through many critical changes in lifestyle and thinking. You may ask what a self-realized being is, and I can tell you quite clearly, it is one who has realized that we are in fact spirits inhabiting bodies, guided by karmic interaction, and one who understands all life is made of light, vibrations, and matter composed of atoms, cells, and molecules, which at a quantum level, penetrates the essence of all living forms existing on this earth and beyond the stars.
My story is a personal journey from America to Europe and the exotic Far East; a fantastic personal passage full of surprises and unconventional living and at points humorous with its twists and turns.
Funny how life is, my wife Pavlina and I had been together since we met on the island of Mykonos in 1983. It was instant love at first sight and we partied hardy most of our lives, traveling in Greece and the islands, all over the world to Europe, the USA, Mexico, and to north and south Thailand and north and south of India where we visited over thirty years and at least twenty times, staying some three months at a stretch during the winters. On most of our travels we ended up staying on the spectacular white sand beaches of Goa.
Then some thirty-five years later, you turn around and look in the mirror and finally realize the party’s almost over. One day Pavlina went to see her doctors and was given a death sentence from liver cancer.
