Vasilios Theodorakis – An Online Author

Following on from my commentary about what we experienced on Good Friday in 2010, is this week’s piece – originally written almost a year ago. It has a similar theme to the Good Friday commentary, highlighting how inappropriate it is to systematically prevent people from worshiping in the language in which they think. The piece is called – “Take A Look Around, This Is What We Are!”

My highlighted author for the week is: Raj Patel – a writer with deep convictions to social and environmental justice. His latest book is – “The Value Of Nothing”

Cheers – Vasilios Theodorakis – May 2010

The keyboard may not be mightier than the sword, but pounding it hard enough can  make a lot more noise than steel cutting through flesh!

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

This week’s piece was written during Easter. Its a personal commentary on how in 2010, an English speaking Orthodox Christian still has to deal with the Church’s inability to differentiate between the Faith and its parishioner’s ancestral nationalisms.

The commentary is called: Good Friday 2010

The highlighted author for the week is: Henry David Thoreau – a poet, environmentalist and activist of the 19th Century.

Cheers – Vasilios Theodorakis – May 2010

This week’s poem was written at the end of March 2010. Its a response to my father discovering that our family’s olive groves were sold (in secret) years ago by my father’s sister. This relative, who I’ve only met once, managed to also squander the proceeds from the sale.

The saddest part of the discovery was that the person forced my grandmother to sign over the rights to the land just before the matriarch of the family died! One has to wonder, what sort of character badgers a 93 year old woman on her death bed for the family’s inheritance! Instances like this, make me glad that I had very little to do with these people over the years.

The poem is called: Olive Grove

The highlighted author for the week is: Chrissie Hynde – though technically not a full time writer, her genuineness, song lyrics and written material on animal rights qualify her as an inspirational person.

Cheers – Vasilios Theodorakis – May 2010

After more than six months of harassment, abuse, assaults and vandalism by a psychotic neighbour, the terror seems to have slowed down (for the time being at least).

The creative down side to all this, is how much time, energy and resources were needed in order to deal with this idiot. Unfortunately, the ongoing drama took me away from editing and uploading material to the blog and left me feeling quite bitter about the whole situation. On the up side however, we now have a secure boundary to our property and the level of safety is substantially better. We also seem to be moving forward again and “baring any unforeseen circumstances” I should be returning to a weekly upload.

Before I forget though, I’d like to thank the people who have continued to read the back catalog of postings and poetry on this site. Without your support (and traffic), the site would not have maintained its search engine ranking over that amount of time, and ranking (for better or worse) is everything in regards to readership on the web.

I’d especially like to thank my readers in the great city of Moscow. My server logs show that the Moscow readership maintained a great interest in the audio versions of the early poetry I uploaded to the site. Please rest assured that I will be uploading additional audio material as soon as I can – thus increasing the repertoire of what you can listen to over time. Your patronage (and bandwidth usage) also allowed the blog to briefly take the top “Theodorakis” ranking with Google (for one week at least), bumping “Mikis Theodorakis” from his number one spot. Mikis’ wikipeadia entry has since regained the top spot, as it well should, considering his artistic legacy. ;)

Cheers – Vasilios Theodorakis – May 2010

It never ceases to amaze me as to how much noise people make regarding the environmental impact of humanity, yet, how little they’re prepared to modify their lifestyles.

For example, after thirty years of intensive research (carried out by agricultural departments in universities across the globe) there are now commonly available facts regarding meat and dairy production and the consumption of natural resources during meat and dairy production. It takes approximately 100000 litres of water to produce 1 kg of beef while it only takes 4000 litres of water to produce 1 kg of lentils – i.e. a saving of 96% of the earth’s resources. Despite the negligible differences in nutrition between beef and lentils, you wouldn’t know there was such an alternative and such a saving gained by simply switching to legumes. And why? Because people don’t want to know – it makes them uncomfortable to think where their food comes from and what impact it has on the planet. Most of us are just too lazy to make a change to our lifestyles. The fact that the meat industry is such a powerful lobby group and promotes its product so well, doesn’t help matters either.

So if you really want to make a change on your environmental impact, switching off your lights for one hour per year,  just isn’t going to cut it! To quote what we’ve printed on our VVOC T-Shirts  – “Want To Save The Planet?” – “Stop Eating Meat!” A simple mantra, that would have a dramatic impact on the environment if all humanity followed it!

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

Tomorrow we bury the brother of a close friend, George. As is often the case in these circumstances, I never got to know Emmanuel as well as I could have, and now it’s too late.

What I do know is that he had a gentle and jolly soul – he never hurt or caused anyone trouble. Such a good person did not deserve to die so suddenly and so tragically. At the age of 41 he had a massive heart attack while at work – away from friends and family. I can only imagine his last moments must have been filled with fear and panic as to what was happening to his body. No one deserves to die so horribly scared – I just hope his suffering didn’t last long and he found peace soon after the attack.

In addition to this tragedy is the tragedy of his family. His father only died a few years ago and both brothers had been sick, experiencing medical complications most of their lives. I’ve often thought, though there is a lot of misery in the world, it is not evenly distributed. There are some who go through life almost charmed and there are others, like these boys (and their parents), who bear an uneven level of suffering compared to the rest of the population.

Emmanuel is survived by his mother and brother George, as well as numerous cousins, aunts and uncles.

“Eternal be, his memory”…
“Emmanuel was, is and will always be a brother in Christ”…

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010