Traveling with Pomegranates Read Online Free PDF

Athena. I’d become fascinated with her. I’d tended to think of her only as a soldier, but long before she was given a helmet and a spear, she had been a nurturing Goddess of fertility, wisdom, and the arts. I liked both sides of her—the wise nurturer and the fierce warrior. But what I loved most was that she was a virgin Goddess. Her virginity was about much more than the fact that she never married. It symbolized her autonomy, her ability to belong to herself. I’d included a section about this in my paper, unable to see then how I had given too much of myself away.
    Standing in a lump of marble fragments, I found a plaque on which the words TEMPLE OF ATHENA were engraved in both Greek and English, and lying on top of it were two yellow wildflowers. Someone had carefully knotted the stems together. An offering to Athena. I felt sure of it. Seeing the flowers, I understood that some people still loved and revered Athena. Time moved on. The whole world moved on. Athena, and her potent meaning, had not gone anywhere.
    Searching the ground, I picked up one of the millions of pebbles scattered around the site. I turned it over in my hand and began to pray for the things Athena was revered for—wisdom, self-possession, bravery.
    I didn’t want anyone to notice what I was doing, and thereby become known as the Weird Girl, so I placed the tiny rock by the yellow flowers as inconspicuously as I could. Don’t ever lose yourself again , I told myself.
    A short time later in the Delphi Museum, I stood mesmerized before a bronze statue from the fifth century BCE known as the Charioteer of Delphi, realistic down to his wiry eyelashes. The story goes that while a French team was clearing a village for excavation, an old Greek woman, who’d previously refused to abandon her house, dreamed of a trapped boy calling to her, “Set me free!
    Set me free,” which finally convinced her to leave. When the archaeologists dug beneath the house, they found the Charioteer.
    “Do you think he’s seeing anyone?” one of the Fun Girls joked, and I laughed, but I also got her point. He was gorgeous. The white of his eyes appeared alive and his mouth seemed about to break into a smile. Kristina explained that his expression depicted the first seconds after his chariot victory. He was on the cusp of elation and the anticipation of it—set in stone—was eternal. When I walked away from him, from Delphi, from the navel of the earth, I felt his voice rumbling down inside me. Set me free, set me free .
    A few days later, however, when Kristina summoned all of us to a footrace on the ancient Olympic track in Olympia, all I heard was the racket of my own panicked self-consciousness. The stadium was packed with tourists. This is so juvenile . Turning to Dr. Gergel, my faculty advisor, I asked if the race was a requirement. “You’ll regret it if you don’t,” she said, smiling. Why were people always saying that to me? I lined up with the others and stared 633 feet to the end. Even with the throng around us, the world seemed to get very quiet. “You are standing exactly where the athletes in ancient times stood; you are breathing in the same space,” Kristina called out. When she blew the whistle, I ran with my whole heart. I hadn’t run like this since my brother, Bob, and I raced barefoot on the beach in South Carolina. I honestly couldn’t believe it when a girl passed me, kicking up dust with her Keds, but by then I had so surprised myself it didn’t matter. I was breathing in the same space. The first- through fourth-place winners stood on the four stone pediments where the athletes had once been crowned. I finished in second place.
    Kristina placed an olive wreath on each of our heads while the rest of the group sang the American national anthem. Someone took our picture. In it, I am smiling like the Charioteer, a cluster of black olives hanging over my right eye.
    Other than a couple of writing contests in my early teens, I had