Mortality

This week in my City as Myth class we have been studying the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Demeter was a powerful goddess who almost destroyed the world after Hades kidnapped her daughter, Persephone. Hades forces Persephone to eat a pomegranate seed which traps her in the underworld 1/3 of the year and allows her in the world above the rest of the time. We talked a lot about this myth and how it inspired the Eleusinian Mysteries, secretive ceremonies related to the cult of Demeter and Persephone that took place in the ancient Greek city of Eleusis. The mysteries had to do with rites that Demeter passed down to mortal men in the Homeric Hymn. According to the text whoever participated in these rites would gain the goddess' favor and be granted a better lot in the afterlife, actions that offered initiates consolation against mortality.

Studying the Mysteries and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter got me thinking about a different kind of mortality. Not of the flesh or the body, but of experience. Today starts the countdown of our last week in Greece. Seven days from now I will be on a plane back to the States. I realized the mortality of this trip from the start, but in its infancy the six weeks we were going to have here seemed like a lifetime. Now that five weeks have come and gone, the realization that our trip is slowly trickling away is a heavy weight on my mind. It's sad to think that this experience will end soon. It has been the trip of a lifetime. But like the saying goes, "All good things must come to an end". And this 'thing', our trip, hasn't just been good. It's been amazing. It's been awe-inspiring. It's been breath-taking. Even if I travel later on, I'll never have another experience like this. I won't be here at this time in my life with these people ever again. I'm just thankful to have been lucky and stumbled into this opportunity to begin with. Because it's been one heck of a ride so far.