Crying in my coffee

I know I've been writing about happiness...and...well, I couldn't stop the tears and no technique was going to save me--at least that's what I thought

I tried to stop them, those tears welling up. Like anyone I imagine, I don’t like to cry in front of people I hardly know, or generally, in front of people at all if I can help it.

But my tears always ignore my preferences and as I stared at the small stack of rumpled papers in front of me, the Ipad-like device that wasn’t charging, and the QR codes on the pieces of tattered paper, I realized it was a battle I was going to lose.

I sat across the counter from the owner of the cafe who had just explained to me how he had been married three times and how he didn’t see any reason not to be friends with all his ex’s. I learned the German woman, also behind the counter who had helped me find a place to stay here long term, was ex. #1. I eat at the restaurant down the road, which I like better for food, which is no problem for them as their daughter runs it. By chance, I have sniffed out two places to spend time that are not going to actually care which I frequent because, like the monetary system in the US, when it comes down to it, they are both run by the same small group of people.

Except these people inspire me and the others don’t.

There were multiple things contributing to those tears which is why they had become an unstoppable force.

He had just asked me what I did and the conversation had travelled quickly into how I can never answer that question adequately, then into how I have a book ready to edit and as I said it, I explained to myself and to him, why it was just sitting.

“I just don’t want to go back in time anymore to work on it. You have to go back in time you know, to really experience things and write from that place and for me, it’s all becoming more of a memory, like from a movie I saw a long time ago. And I just don’t want to try to go back into it anymore…”

I didn’t add that my new editor’s favorite part of my unpublished book are the chapters I added most recently, that I found the hardest to write. Chapters I had called in my mind, “The Sex Chapters.”

“Ooooohhhh, those made me gasp,” she said.

She wanted me to write more in that style, more “show don’t tell,” she said.

I could take out the parts where I veered into mentioning attachment styles, or other things that I feel make up the bones and main reason I wrote the thing in the first place.

“Just mention where people can go to read about that,” she said. “You don’t need to tell people so much. Let them go find out for themselves.”

Which left me feeling like if I do as she desires, I will have a book that feels like a stranger to me. It would not be the book I set out to write and I wasn’t so sure it would fulfill the purpose I had in mind for it, which was to help people who were going through similar things. Even those most recent chapters had a purpose tied into personal transformation, although I wasn’t sure if she got that from them.

So it is sitting and I am stubbornly ignoring it.

Plus it is true.

It is harder to go back in time and feel things from the state I was in back then.

When things truly integrate, they start to melt away.

And that’s a good thing.

So, all that was bubbling up in me when he asked what I did?

Then when I mentioned my previous marriage, and started to explain that after a stint of teaching I stopped when I had two children. I wanted to stay home with them and was busy homeschooling them off and on. I also took care of cleaning the house, and did all the shopping and cooking… So…I hadn’t had a job for all those years, I said, (still feeling a bit of shame which always causes me to over-explain things).

They both looked at me quizzically and said, “But that is a job.”

And of course, I know they were right. But…

Then I tried to explain how my ex husband hadn’t quite seen it the same way and how California law works and how my divorce was contentious and how my family quit talking to me and how that led to me actually feeling more free and happy and, and, and…

Then I mentioned the thing that struck home.

I am not sure how much he understood of the babbling above as he was sitting a bit away from me and his English was good and much better than my non-existent Greek, yet still a bit rusty around the edges. His first wife had headed off to help someone, as she was serving people in the restaurant…and somehow the underlying truth of it all slipped out, “Well, and I felt like an object.”

And I could see my comment instantly land despite my voice, which had become quieter. It was in his eyes.

“Oh, I understand,” he said, as he gazed compassionately into my soul across the eight or ten feet of space between us that had suddenly, inexplicably, disappeared.

And he did.

I could feel it.

It was at that moment, I realized how much I was learning from “doing nothing” here. How walking to the sea, completely naked, and not feeling like someone’s personal property, or an object of desire…that walking to the beach with a bunch of humans around me who had no interest at all in me…was a dang healing thing for me.

Not that I am here for healing.

I wrote about my aversion to that last week.

So, let me reframe that word.

It is empowering.

It is freeing to be able to do that.

I won’t be walking around naked around anyone back home.

For many reasons.

I most likely won’t be doing it anytime soon anywhere.

But here in this little oasis of a town, on this tiny oasis of a beach, it is serving me quite well.

I plan to do it again today soon after I finish writing.

So, I felt all of that.

And I haven’t gotten to the QR codes yet. They had been poking at me even before we started talking about what I did.

You see, I have decided I like it here in Crete. I could stay. It reminds me of California before it got all dry, or water became so expensive, or both… Before people let the fruit trees die and all the orange groves in Irvine I can hardly remember but do, went through a slow, creeping gray-limbed death from lack of irrigation and then became Orwellian track homes.

Crete reminds me of how things used to be.

The problem is, Crete is facing the same problems of Technocracy and overreach when it comes to government and taxes that everywhere else seems to be facing and that troubles me.

But I figured, if I could somehow move here and get a Visa, maybe there was a way to avoid being a tax resident as one tax return a year is enough for me (so far it appears there isn’t and I still need to dive a little deeper)?

But whatever I figured out for my own situation did nothing for the people in front of me and I cared about them too.

Since I have been here I have heard it is illegal for a business to not accept a credit card.

I learned that when a tour guide wouldn’t accept mine and instead asked me to go to an ATM when we got to our destination, of which there was only one. I was immediately suspicious of it. I had become skeptical of ATMs after going to Mexico and having one scam me with an exorbitant exchange rate despite me hitting the “decline transaction” button. I was saved from using the only option though as it was out of service.

But the tour guide was determined. So she had the bus pull over on the way home while she pointed to another stand-alone kiosk across the busy street and told me and a few other people who didn’t bring any cash to “go there.” She had been clear with all of us that “the credit card machine doesn’t work on the bus.”

I won’t go much further into the story, or that no one had told me I would need cash when I booked the tour.

Just that I and a few other women who still needed to pay were hustled across the street while a tour bus full of people waited for us. I took out 100 Euros under pressure and saw the machine was charging a spread on the exchange rate in addition to the transaction fee. I hadn’t figured out, or seen the button to decline allowing them to do so, so the 100 Euros cost me ten or fourteen more.

The whole thing irritated me.

That is when someone, I think the waitress in my favorite restaurant the next day, mentioned it is illegal to not accept a credit card.

“You could have called the police and reported them, but tourists don’t know that,” she said.

Now, that sounds good, or not.

The truth is, I don’t think people should be forced to take any form of money. I think people working should be able to accept what they choose in exchange for their labor. I just want to be told ahead of time so I can decide on my end, if I want to provide what they desire.

It felt like government overreach to me.

Then there was the short conversation with the owner of the hotel I was staying at, at the time. We sat outside at a small table and I asked for his perspective on the recent financial crisis here. I told myself it was time to read that bit in Lynn Alden’s book again because the details of it all were still beyond me.

And honestly, when it comes to banking and the manipulation of the financial system, I feel I am painfully aware of things that go on, and still not aware enough, both at the same time.

He explained it nice and simple though, so I haven’t bothered to read that part of her book again.

“They just used it as an excuse to tax us more,” he said. “Now it is like everyone has to stand in one shoe.”

That shoe image stuck.

It was clear that people here are highly taxed and suffering for it.

It is also clear that they can’t ask for cash, although this is what they prefer. If I purchase a dress, for instance, in a shop, the shopkeeper has to pay 25% of the purchase price in tax… you can see where I am going with all of this.

Technocracy is here.

In Greece.

Now I was sitting with my coffee at the cafe where Yanni works. I partly went because he and the other people are so dang friendly when I walk by that I wanted to spend more time there…despite the fact that they smoke and the food isn’t as good as the other family owned restaurant.

But they were the only place who steamed the milk for my filtered coffee and when it came to coffee and friendliness, they couldn’t be beat.

So, my new strategy which I was trying out for the first time that morning was to stop there for coffee and then head to their daughter’s restaurant for food.

It made me happy. At least, I thought it would be fun.

“What are these for?” I asked, pointing at the QR codes.

I think by then, I was trying to move beyond the “he only saw me as an object” part of our conversation and my thoughts of the multifaceted reasons it was a good idea to continue being naked on the beach.

But part of me could smell that my question was yet another rabbit hole that was going to lead to something else I would find troubling.

“Oh those. Well, we have to scan them in every day. There is one for each person who works here. And our machine is not working…” (someone pulled out a container that reminded me of my own that I used to have, filled with various cords and adaptors with forgotten or hoped-for uses, and foraged around for something that might fit the ipad-like thing needed to scan the tattered paper QR codes, necessary for the government regulations.)

Later, at breakfast at their daughter’s restaurant, (which I now choose to pay for in cash after figuring out how to use the ATMs and opt out of the exchange rate they offer me), their son-in-law mentioned the same QR codes and said he couldn’t get them scanned in the day before as something was broken. He was just heading out to pay the government fine.

Those QR codes, just like the “he saw me as an object” hit something even deeper.

It was something I didn’t want to lose faith in and my faith had been shaken badly.

It was probably the other reason that drew me there for coffee.

I didn’t want to think about it and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

You see, the other thing I have been doing here while “doing nothing” but spending time naked on the beach and eating healthy food in local restaurants is reading.

One of the books was really making me think about the financial system again.

The man across from me who just explained the QR codes mentioned something else.

“After Covid, it was like everything got 30% more expensive,” he said.

And I saw the pain in his eyes.

Because on top of that, I knew he was paying around 40% in taxes.

My brain, which I can’t stop sometimes, told me he was probably wrong about the 30%. The US had increased the money supply by 40% and I imagined there probably was a similar ripple effect in Greece. So my brain, with no real data, upped his 30% to 40%.

Don’t ask me why. Sometimes, I think my brain just likes to torture me and it was on a roll.

My brain silently continued as I stared at those tattered pieces of paper:

“Ok Terra. If he had one dollar, it is now worth about sixty or seventy cents. Then he pays 40% in taxes…so that leaves him with thirty or thirty five cents of what his dollar used to buy before all that money printing and taxing…”

This is just a summary of what my brain was doing and not an evaluation of how the US money printing ripples out to Greece or any suggestion that my calculation was in any way correct.

But, certainly it was clear to me that people here on Crete, despite living on an island that produces, or has produced, enough food to be self-sustaining, are suffering.

Yanni, the friendly waiter here I refused to meet for dinner, works seven days a week.

I learned this morning, that when people finish working what is called, “The Season,” at the beach, they head into the groves to pick olives.

Well, mostly olives.

As the man across the counter told me many people are cutting down the olive trees to plant oranges, and now avocados. Whatever is the most lucrative.

“Olive trees take a long time to grow,” I said, stating the obvious.

I had become pretty attached to them, even more so now that I was slathering myself in olive oil daily and liked smelling green and olive-y.

He nodded his head sadly as he puffed on his hand-rolled cigarette and smoke wafted towards me.

My memory of feeling like an object, the state of the financial system here and its affects on the people who’s struggle showed in their eyes, and the book that was causing me to question things that had been giving me hope combined with the final straw of cutting down the olive trees for money was all just too much. Plus the QR codes hadn’t stopped staring at me.

I knew I was going to cry and didn’t have time to get away.

I turned my head sideways and tried to hide the tears that were getting ready to spill.

Successfully, I might add, except from Yanni…who is the sensitive waiter who could feel my distress regardless of what I did with my hair or face.

He didn’t look at me, but placed a small container of napkins next to me as he passed by.

It was kind.

And I knew this was one of those moments where the grief felt like it was going to get big. I wrote about the beachball thing last week. Well, if my grief was a beachball I was trying to hold underwater, this one was more the size of an inflatable submarine.

I paid quickly and found a bench all by itself between the two restaurants, that faced the sea.

view from the bench

I tried to console myself with things like this:

“You know Terra, the more deeply you feel the hard things, the more deeply you feel all the rest of it.” (Meaning things like: delight, peace, joy, love, and contentment.)

And I have found that to be true.

Nevertheless, sobbing on a bench in the middle of a tiny town, while my heart was breaking for the state of the world, was not what I really wanted to be doing right then.

At that moment I also reminded myself I spent time last night before bed, two hours of time actually, watching a Dr. David Clemens video and doing a guided mediation to upgrade my frequency state.

Maybe, even though I was tired at the time and wasn’t sure I was really participating adequately, that mediation was affecting me?

The submarine continued rising and I didn’t know what to do, so I closed my eyes and resorted to prayer. This submarine felt like too much for me to handle on my own.

I called in my higher self, my guides, and any forces vetted by them as helpful and told them, “help me please…I don’t understand…I am losing hope…why am I here?”

You know, the usual things.

And that’s when it happened.

I realized I needed to do what I have been writing about.

I needed to feel the state of the world I wished to experience. You know, the positive outcome of all that is happening now.

So, I did.

I felt for it like a blind person in the dark…outside the grief and the worry…I felt for the world I know this one is becoming.

And, I am sure with the help I had called in with my desperate prayers, what I felt was beautiful and rather quickly, I moved into an exalted state. Which means I felt like I had taken a very strong does of psilocybin mushrooms, except I hadn’t.

And I had to ask myself and those guides, my higher self, and the divine field of energy, a little humorously, “Now what am I going to do?”

Because sitting on a bench sobbing wasn’t what I wanted to do in public and sitting on a bench in an extremely heightened state was challenging in a different way.

I asked them to tone things down a bit please.

They accommodated me and not long after, I was sitting in front of a plate of scrambled eggs with feta, and I imagine oregano, and a large glass of orange juice.

And what I learned from that moment felt important. I learned that it is something I can do. I can focus on what I know is possible, in the best version of life’s unfolding, and feel it. I can choose what radio station I play in my body.

In a way, we are all towers emitting frequency states.

It was nice to realize I could do so consciously.

It gave me hope and that in itself, is a powerful thing.

It is something I won’t forget. And I won’t forget that it helped a lot to reach out for some invisible support as well. It showed up right away.

I wasn’t as alone on that bench as it seemed.

“help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it”

—JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I learned JK Rowling is right. Help is always given…

The next morning, over my cup of coffee again, we continued talking about the three ex-wives he is still friends with, and his wish to find another, which I couldn’t fully understand. Partly due to a language barrier, partly because I couldn’t hear well as we sat in the same seats which were on opposite sides of the counter, and partly because I just can’t comprehend his strategy.

He gave me some sea salt to take with me with a little paper sticker on the outside he said I needed to get it through customs and said something else about how he had to pay taxes to give it to people but the taxes weren’t too much and how it should all be ok if I put it in my checked luggage.

It was salt he had gathered himself, and also with his son who came to visit him here. It came from the rocks next to the sea where it crystalized into white, glittering diamonds.

He showed me a video of his ten year old son who came to visit from Sweden, holding a slotted spoon as he gently removed the salt from the water.

“It’s different when it comes from the rocks,” he said. “They use the sea water and dry it other ways, but it doesn’t taste the same. Something must happen when it comes from the rocks.”

I am reminded that salt used to be used as a form of currency and how generous and kind his offering felt. That salt means a lot to me.

He told me he thinks Crete won’t be the same in ten years. How there are invasive fish species and pollution coming from other countries. He told me about his own olive trees that sometimes get insects in the seeds if they don’t get the rain they need. How he catches calamari for his restaurant from his boat. How the boat engine needs repairs…

And I could feel the tears that were hiding there, in him as well.

Tears aren’t bad things. They speak of care and beauty. It’s good to see what is happening.

And hope is something that I feel is quite key right now.

Like a good dose of scrambled eggs with oregano, or a cup of coffee combined with generosity, it highlights that there are possibilities that we can’t yet see…

But we can feel them and let the state run through our bodies.

It’s a kind of magic, you see.

I think it’s partly why he gave the salt to me.

the sea salt he gathered from the rocks, drying in the sun

the package he gave me to take with me

sunrise in Sougia, Crete

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