We’re out the door at 6:30 am to fly to Izmir for a day exploring Ephesus. We sail luggage-less through the airport for the brief flight and board our familiar buses that the drivers have brought to Izmir while we slept. We’ve already bonded with our gentle-giant bus drivers but this is the last we’ll be seeing of them before we are deposited at our Mediterranean resort in Bodrum this evening.
Lunch is the lunch of all lunches at an outdoor restaurant–not another kebab carb-fest with questionable, colon-corrupting, cucumber/tomato salad crucifixions, but a meal cooked by an accomplished Turkish cookbook author and actual female. It’s what people here eat at home, with lots of exotic and tasty vegetable dishes. Great mom energy in the food, appropriate for a visit to the post-crucifixion home of Jesus’ mom and John the Beloved.
Ephesus is where John and Mary escaped to and possibly/probably lived in their later years. (Of course there’s historical debate about all this stuff.) Apparently they were the only ones in Jesus’ inner circle who died of natural causes. All of this sounds very likely to me because it’s just like the John-Roger we know. He was not someone who was gunning for martyrdom and generally managed to find salubrious spots to hang out. And Ephesus is that—a huge ancient city/market/temple/port complex in a setting with beautiful views. We walk the wide colonnaded streets that John the Beloved and Mary (probably) walked.
And we visit the house where Mary (supposedly) lived and John the Beloved’s (likely) tomb. Our guide Batu tells a touching story of his mother’s miraculous healing there. I feel a peaceful, homey energy in these places that sources in something very high that’s both transcendent and nurturing, both father and mother—a lot like J-R’s more recent abode in Mandeville Canyon. A concoction with the same ingredients of personal love and universal Love. Not life-changing like the Church or St. Peter but a thimble-full of that same sweetness. But is that from the millions of tourist/pilgrims, or the theological myth-makers, or the light columns that the new and improved John the Beloved placed? The mind asks the oddest questions, always with some kind of hidden psychosis that defies logic—like my inner experiences aren’t real unless they can be verified by an external source, which would make them no longer inner experiences. And yet I walk around looking for signs of what’s externally real, like someone continually looking through the wrong end of the binoculars.
John’s blessings and mini-seminars overlooking Mary’s house and the ruins of Ephesus have so much inner pull and harmonizing light that all these conflicting levels and mind-blunders reach a transcendent truce above the stony ruins. It’s like I’m looking down on history and myth from very high vantage point. Our tour becomes a floating peace walk in a Traveler time-bubble.
And in true Traveler style, we take a couple of hours’ bus ride and we’re deposited at the polar opposite of our holy peace walk—a ritzy, sexy cool resort for a nighttime, barely-lit oceanside buffet, on hip cushioned wicker furniture with house music playing and a big bar and all the familiar, fashionable sushi-like food, erewhon-esque salads, the usual tiny unnameable edible things sculpted like jewelry, calm and fawning well-dressed waiters (and waitresses), etc. It’s like we’re home…whatever that means.
