Girl Goes to Greece:
My Love-Warrior Goddessey;
or, Aphrodite Made Me Do It 

"WHAT’S that you’re humming?"

The tantalizing tune floats my way on a balmy, Aegean breeze; while the sun does a slow leave-taking, lively waves are whipped into whitecaps below.

"Just a little song," says my lover.

We’re at the seaside taverna where he’s just finished his meal and I continue to eat: fresh, tangy feta dusted with oregano; chewy, grilled octopus lightly bathed in lemon juice; and some meaty Kalamatas plumped-up by brine. We sip anise-flavored, iced ouzo–quintessential Greek concoction that sharpens the appetite, relaxes the body and sweetens the mind; its lovely licorice aroma inducing deep, sensuous repose.

"Which one?"

"I don’t know yet; it just started to come to me."

He raises his glass and clinks it gently against mine. Then he feeds me an olive, picks up my hand and kisses my fingertips.

"It is for you, the way you sound to me in music," he says, "my ‘Kathleen’ song—about the amazing woman from America who came here and found me.” He kisses me again, this time on my kiss-chapped lips, my mouth still full of olive.

Years later, the song, my song, is a musical reminder of love at first sight—erotas me tin proti matia, as the Greeks say–a phenomenon that, despite being widely acknowledged, I never thought to be true, until I went to Greece and it happened to me, one April evening, in the year when the Hale-Bopp comet was streaking through the naked-eye skies.

How fitting my lover and I met in Greece—setting for the ancient myth of Eros and Psyche, a story also propelled by love at first “eye". We learn, like lovers always do, that when Aphrodite gets involved, the love goddess will definitely mess with you.

As I set off from New York City I consider myself a worldly-wise kind of gal, but once I get to Greece, I rethink everything I thought I knew about Love.

Aphrodite sets things straight and makes a believer out of me. Like Psyche, I must navigate through the preposterous predicaments, formidable hurdles and absurd laws of attraction imposed on me by the irresistible, irrepressible, indomitable goddess of love, Aphrodite, who teaches me, "Love’s goal is not to know thyself, but reveal thyself."

An excerpt and song, from Kathleen Cromwell's forthcoming book, and its accompanying soundtrack, Girl Goes to Greece: My Love-Warrior Goddessey; Or, Aphrodite Made Me Do it.

Photo descriptions from top to bottom: Snake Goddess, Minoan Bee Pendant, Flag of Hydra, Greece, Map of Athens, Greece, Phaistos Disc, “Hydra, 1948” (detail) by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas (1906 -1994)