When the war in Iraq began, I moved to Greece. When I arrived on the island of Lemnos, on July 2, 2003, I didn't realize how shipwrecked I was, or what I was searching for. That understanding came only later. The illusory sound and light show some call “End Times” was in full swing.The systems we believed in, on which we had based our lives, were collapsing. On what new ground will we construct a different future? It's one thing to stumble on ancient rock, and something else again to recognize it as the truth. Lemnos was an accident. I didn't know I was headed there until I saw the poster on the wall of the ticket office in Thessalonika, and recognized it as the place I'd seen in a dream that night before. In any case, there was no other boat leaving that day. Landing in blinding sunlight the bleached harbour, I wondered why I'd come. A woman stood on the pier, and offered me not just a room but a whole apartment. It was too expensive but i didnt care, since I wasnt staying long. Arriving here by chance, knowing nothing of the place, I still felt a rare sense of homecoming. A bare, volcanic island in the northern Aegean, it was formerly home to a mystery cult known as the Kabirii. There are fascinating archaeological ruins including an ancient theatre at Hephaistea, as well as the oldest known European settlement, the 6,000-year-old village of Poliochni. A strategic island, shaped like a butterfly, 50 km from the site of ancient Troy, in 1915 Lemnos billeted Canadian, British and Australian soldiers bound for the campaign at nearby Gallipoli. With a long and fascinating history of independence and opposition to Athenian domination, to this day, it challenges visitors with its peculiar, almost lunar beauty. In ancient times it was ruled by Amazons, who famously threw their men off a cliff to punish them for infidelity. The dark red earth of Lemnos was known around the Mediterranean for its medicinal powers. Today, its people stubbornly cling to old traditions while energetically adopting all the modern annoyances. My time on Lemnos was an adventure, a modern fairy tale on the theme of survival in a challenging period of history. As I talked with librarians, animals, rocks, porpoises, pine trees, birds and the ever-present dead, I began to understand how we create our lives out of nothing.

We began building a stone cabin on the slopes of Skourga, the old volcano. We began by collecting stones, which were plentiful. First Alexandros dowsed the area with a metal rod to find a spot not crisscrossed by underground streams. Then we dug a rectangular hole, three metres by five metres, and once it was dug, we began filling it up with rubble, which the Greeks call “robobula,” from the hillside. After that we poured cement and erected a two-by-two inch post at each of the corners, and tied a long string which we would use to line up our walls. Then, using an old red wheelbarrow with a large hole in the bottom, we began collecting larger rocks. Some were veined with quartz, good for repelling electromagnetic signals from the cell phone towers. Others were stamped with the fossilized remains of ancient ferns and foot-long centipedes that had perished in the last eruption, some 10,000 years ago. Every day for months, until it became too hot to work, we moved rocks, piling them up on all four sides. Then it was time to build. Neither of us had ever built a house before, and it turned out I was the one who loved selecting stones, fitting them in place, and adding cement from a plastic bucket with our one and only trowel. The work was slow, sometimes interrupted by bad weather or Alexandros’ insistence on taking naps. I became obsessed with old Greek farmhouses, built by hand out of stone and dirt and thorns, standing in ruins in empty fields that had once supported families. Outdoor ovens fascinated me. I wanted to build one of those, too, and got directions from Dimitraki, a talented builder who came to show us how to make proper corners. One day our dog took me for a walk in the village of Kondias, all the way to the bright green door of Despina Aggera, a village woman who had died a year or two earlier. Inside the abandoned house we found the remnants of her life. Pain medication, letters from her daughter in Australia, photographs and books lay scattered in rooms where pigeons now nested on ceiling beams. Opening a small wooden chest, I found the skeletons of two dead cats. Beginning that night, and for the next week, Despina appeared in my dreams, a bent old crone in a headscarf, and told me about her life, her love of music and writing, and another abandoned house a few metres farther along the path which she thought I should also investigate. “Don’t worry about money!” she said. “Just move to the village, and you’ll see. You’ll have a roof over your head in no time!”

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In recent years, the western world has learned great lessons about deception, having seen it enthroned and personified at the highest levels of office. Lies have a short half-life, and believing in them can produce spectacular illusory results, including war – seen as a means of survival in End Times. Without mass media to promote it, war would be impossible. On the other hand, truth is a self-cleansing stream that carries us forward into a world of light. As long as we flow with the stream of our own our clear vision, we cannot be poisoned or harmed because we remain in touch with our own moving current of light. Eternity, like water, is self-renewing in every moment, and cannot be interrupted by commercials for Armageddon. One day the lies run their course and lose their charm. When all our lies have dissolved, what will be left behind? A chorus of schoolchildren shout out the answer: "The Truth!"But what does truth look like? What does a rock have to tell a generation raised on steel and cement? Natural elements may be the only things capable of saving us but can they still speak to us? Can we hear them? Can these elements be brought together into something that adds up to a human life, here in Canada, this nation of ghosts with whom we negotiate illusory agreements? Can we save our society, which was based on theft and may soon be stolen out from under us?