Michael N. McGregor

Tag: Greece

  • Talking Points: What Is ‘An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life’ About?

    Talking Points: What Is ‘An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life’ About?

    A few weeks ago, I did a interview on Talk Radio Europe about my new book, An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life. To prepare for it, I wrote out some ‘talking points.’ I thought they might be useful to those thinking of buying or recommending the book, so here they are.

    1. The book is mostly a memoir, centered in my experience living alone on the island of Patmos in Greece 40 years ago, when there were no cellphones, laptops or internet, and a phone call was absurdly expensive. I was 6,000 miles from home, in the middle of winter, on a remote island where I knew no one. The experience changed me.

    2. Being alone for that long as a young man gave me a chance to know myself on a deeper level, to learn that our potential is much greater than we think, and to believe for the first time that I was a writer. A creative writer.

    3. In this age when we are assaulted by opinions, ads and media from all directions, solitude is more necessary than ever. It gives you a rest from the noise and confusion and allows to you get to know yourself—your thoughts, opinions and beliefs—without the pressure of other people’s views.

    4. Solitude can start with something as simple as turning off the notifications on your smart phone or taking the ear buds out of your ears and being alive to the world around you.

    5. Among the places I’ve found solitude are libraries, trains, parks, a forest, a retreat center, and even with my mother in a small park near the care facility she lived in at the end of her life.

    6. The book talks about solitude in relation to creativity, grief, overwork, spiritual contemplation, appreciation of nature, and the need simply for rest.

    7. Much of the book is set in Europe because it is about the dozen years I led tours throughout Europe, including Spain and Portugal, Greece and Turkey, and, in the days just after the Berlin Wall fell, some of the first trips by Westerners into Eastern Europe.

    8. At its core, it’s one man’s story of how solitude has affected his life over decades, with quotes from writers, thinkers, and spiritual figures—and tips along the way for benefiting from solitude yourself.

    9. It includes the harder parts of solitude too, including the threat of loneliness and the fact that when you isolate yourself and reflect on your life some of the things that come to you will be uncomfortable. In solitude you have the time and space to work through those things.

    10. Solitude vs. loneliness. I think solitude is actually an antidote to loneliness. Loneliness comes when we measure ourselves against society’s expectations—or our perceptions of society’s expectations. In choosing solitude, you’re also choosing to let go of those expectations and find out what your real interests, beliefs, and desires are. When you return to the world, you can pursue these truer interests instead of listening to others’ agendas for you and the world.

    11. One thing it’s important to stress is that solitude is never for yourself only. It’s always for others too. By taking time to be alone, you find rest and you learn more about yourself. This allows you to return to the company of others fully alive, fully yourself, with something unique to offer. You can cut through the superficiality that tends to dominate our social lives.

    12. The book is a bit of a travelogue too. The reader journeys along with me to this beautiful island in the Aegean, sees the land and the sea, and meets some of the Greek islanders who treated me with such love and care.

    13. You don’t need to go to a Greek island to reap the benefits of solitude. You can do it in a closet in your home or a nearby park or a library—anywhere you can find a quiet space in which to spend time away from others and your usual life. You can even do it among others if you maintain your quiet while walking or running or biking through the world.

    14. Solitude teaches you to slow down, be patient, and pay attention to the world around you as well as the one inside you. It opens you up to things you haven’t had time to notice, including spiritual dimensions of life.

    All photographs: © Michael N. McGregor

    Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I’ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining MichaelNMcGregor.com.

  • A Look Back at My Tour Guiding Days in Greece

    The other day, Sylvia brought out photo albums from our tour guiding days in the 1990s. The shots here are from one of the trips I led through Greece and Turkey when I had my own company, Halcyon Tours.

    My tours were focused on small groups, learning about the local culture, and staying in local-style places where my clients could get to know the people of an area. Of course, there were plenty of opportunities for wine-drinking on rooftops in places like Oia on Santorini too!

    Back then, Oia was still somewhat unvisited. Many of the buildings hadn’t been rebuilt after the massive (7.5 magnitude) earthquake that hit the island in 1956.

    Photo courtesy of greekreporter.com

    (You can read about the earthquake and watch a short documentary about it here.)

    This is what Oia looks like at sunset today:

    Photo courtesy of commonerscauseway.com

    In high season now, as many as 17,000 cruise ship tourists disembark on the island EACH DAY, with most of them crowding into the small town of Oia at sunset time.

    ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

    To be immersed in the kind of adventure it was possible to have in Europe before the awful crush of cruise-ship mass tourism, check out my forthcoming novel, The Last Grand Tour, available for pre-order now. (It will be published on January 28, 2025.)

    Here’s a synopsis:

    American tour guide Joe Newhouse wants nothing more than to reach Venice. Since moving to Munich after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’s watched his business fail, his wife leave him, and his love for Europe diminish. Now he faces one last ten-day tour with a surly group that doesn’t want to be there. As he leads them through the mythic lands of Europe’s Romantic past, he grows increasingly disturbed by their stories of earlier lives, puzzled by their desire to be with a man who doesn’t arrive, and entangled in an illicit affair that promises to either save him or plunge his tour-and his life-into madness.

    Soaked in the Romantic atmosphere and dark deeds of old Europe-as well as the freedoms and hopes of a new era-The Last Grand Tour takes us on a perilous journey through Hitler’s Berchtesgaden, Mozart’s Salzburg, and Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian fantasyland before reaching its stunning climax in the murky waters of Venice. Along the way, it explores the often-shifting lines between fidelity and freedom, illusion and reality, regret and desire.

    Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I’ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining this website.

  • Thoughts on the Refugees Crossing to Greece

    Thoughts on the Refugees Crossing to Greece

    These thoughts were published on Nov. 4 on the Christian Century‘s Then & Now blog:

    When the Greek islands were hospitable to strangers

    Nov 04, 2015 by Michael N. McGregor

    Recently the online world has been filled with images of people in desperate conditions, images not from Pakistan or Syria but from the Greek islands closest to Turkey: Chios, Lesbos, Leros. One picture showed a migrant raft landing near sunbathing tourists on Kos, an island I once knew well. It was a way station on my yearly visits to the nearby island of Patmos, where St. John was once a refugee himself. I went there to visit another immigrant to Greece: a spiritual poet named Robert Lax, who was Thomas Merton’s best friend.

    Lax made his home in Greece, first on the island of Lesbos, then on Kalymnos, and finally on Patmos. One reason he did this was that the Greek Orthodox islanders lived their Christian faith more deeply and fully than other people he’d known, and this included following the biblical injunction to show hospitality to strangers. When Lax landed on Lesbos in 1962 and then traveled through the islands, people came out of their homes to give him things—loaves of fresh bread, water from a well, an apronful of almonds.

    They did this because he was a stranger passing through a land that had few strangers in it. And because they believed the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:40: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Even when I started visiting in the 1980s, the Greek islanders were still overwhelmingly hospitable, calling out to me to offer oranges or water or ouzo.

    It wasn’t until 2006 that I witnessed a different response to people entering the country. As I walked to a beach on Patmos one day, a voice called out to me. Off to my left in a decrepit building—a onetime school or government structure—the second-floor windows were lined with thin, dark-skinned men apparently being detained. The one calling out asked me to come nearer. When I did, he pantomimed that he wanted a pen. When I pulled one out of my pocket, he lowered a kind of bucket on a rope made of rags. Then, as the men in the windows were smiling and nodding their thanks, two Greek women arrived with bags of supplies for them—cigarettes and food and sodas. These women may have been the last remnant of those who once greeted strangers openly.

    I don’t know if the men in that building were Albanians, who were the main Greek refugees then, or if they were part of the first wave of what has become a flood of Middle Easterners seeking a haven in Europe. The number of refugees pouring into Greece this year, most of them fleeing the fighting in Syria, is more than ten times last year’s number. An estimated 50,000 people entered Greece in July alone. And the conditions they are kept in—in this once-hospitable country—are worse than those I saw as a journalist in refugee camps on the Cambodian border and off the coast of Malaysia during the era of the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese boat people.

    No doubt some of the Christian people in Greece are calling the refugees crossing the watery border “criminals,” “terrorists,” and even “rapists,” as migrants have been called by some in the U.S. Given the economic situation, it makes sense that Greeks would be afraid. The once healthy flow of EU money has thinned, and unemployment—even without migrants—is at 25 percent (50 percent among youth). Where, though, I wonder, lies the line between biblical hospitality and self-preservation?

    “Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord,” says Proverbs 19:17, “and he will reward them for what they have done.” The question for God, I suppose, is Is there a limit? Can you really expect us to welcome anyone? What about our own safety?

    When he was young, the poet Lax, like his friend Merton, chose to live simply, without possessions he’d need to protect. But he did it out in the world, on his own, not in a monastery. His small house on Patmos had a lock, but he left the key in the outside slot. I wonder now, 15 years after his death, as people are celebrating his centenary and Merton’s, how he would view these refugees. I wonder, too, how I should view them, having known and written a book about him. Having been a Christian all my life.