Lotus eaters

One of our guests this week is a Brit who has also made Polynesia his home. It's fascinating to meet someone who's followed a similar path to my own. It gets me thinking about the choices I've made.

In Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, after days being tossed on a troubled sea, Odysseus and his men come across an island inhabited by lotus-eaters, a people whose food source was the flowers and fruits of the 'lotus', a plant which induces an apathetic state of torpor. Three of his men taste the delicious fruits and no longer wish to return to their previous life of hardship and toil.

When I first made my decision to 'fall off the face of the earth' I was warned about lotus-eating, by a friend. And it's true, moving here has profoundly changed my life, but I'm not sure it's necessarily lotus-eating (though Polynesian society's penchant for kava and pot, does have some parallels). The 'lotus tree' that Homer refers to was most likely Zizyphus lotus, a plant in the buckthorn family, that grows in the Mediterranean into Northern Africa, related to the jujube, and not necessarily the water-lily Nymphaea lotus, though the Nile blue water-lily, N. caerulaea, does have psychotropic properties.

It's true that our idyllic lifestyle and the incredible beauty does help you forget about the world outside, the incompetency of the local government, the horrors of the Trump administration and Britain's blundering towards Brexit. It just all seems less sharply in focus from here. I can put it in context, it is less crushing. I am no longer ruled by stress and dissatisfaction, the malaise of the western world. I'm now more active than ever, and every day brings new challenges, new projects, I learn just a little more. I have a simple life, but one that is honest and deeply satisfying. Even more so, now that I have rediscovered my literary passion. I do wonder where I might have been if I had continued in academia, but its ivory towers and smugness often felt just as detached from reality as here. So tell me who is it that's eating 'lotus'...