All God is one God All Creation is one Creation All Life is one Life All People is one People All Faith is one Faith All Tradition is one Tradition All Love is one Love All I have is: A body, A mind, A soul, A patch of Earth, A Bible, A drum, A family, A community, A history, A future, A Prayer. [View Full Entry]

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Yeah, I know that blog title sounds like it came off a movie poster, but hopefully my new homepage can be at least as entertaining as a trip to the theater. Go see for yourself: www.nicnakis.com A lot of big things are brewing. I'm going back to Kenya, for example. But most of this has been written about on the new page (or will be), so friends and family of the Mad Greek should probably bookmark it. Topics include: - Photo blogs - Adventure blogs - Fitness blogs - Spiritual/philosophical blogs - Blogs about me and Chelly - And whatever [View Full Entry]

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Surprise! Most of you must not know it, but I'm back in the U.S.A. I say you must not know it because almost everyone I run into here is shocked to see me. Guess I didn't give enough solid info in my preceding blogs. So. Here's the current update: - Chelly is in Kenya, taking care of her family and gathering paperwork for her visa interviews. Word is she's also been practicing her sewing and clothing design skills on Momma's sewing machine. - I am in America, getting back to work so that I can save some money for the [View Full Entry]

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I'm writing this entry just a few hours before I get onto an airplane for that last stretch of travel which ends my trip. I'm in Greece and I've had an amazing day with my parents and some long-lost, newly-discovered cousins. I'm painfully missing Chelly and we'll have thousands more miles between us soon. In short, there is a lot going on inside me as I write this last live blog from the road. The trip to Greece was very different than any of the other country-visits I've had in the last six months. It was a family trip--for one [View Full Entry]

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Since Crete was the main focus of my trip to lovely Greece, it's only fitting that Crete be the place I stretch my legs and find the pulse of this country of my ancestors. Chania It all went down in a place called Chania; we didn't spend every day there, but it was our homebase and the place where we got to be lazy. Chania is an old, old town. Inhabited by ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Venetians, and Turks, it was also the capitol of the short-lived independent nation of Crete. Now it's a tourist place, open to anyone [View Full Entry]

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The blazing beams of the sun shine across vast space and a crystal blue sky, bathing me in heat and light while wave after wave of cooled air molecules roll in from the Mediterranean, smash across my side, and tangle with my blowing hair. I'm standing on an Athens rooftop in the early morning, breathing and meditating after some long Hatha Yoga practice while the sweat dries on the Kenyan cloth Leso I've been using as a mat. I think about God's perspective: the simultaneous viewpoint of every particle, molecule, and complex structure in the universe. I think about the emptiness [View Full Entry]

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These are the last things I put down in my journal before moving on. Not a complete cycle of thoughts, but a good time capsule showing the status of my ideas just before leaving Africa. Musings Let's start with the recapitulation hypothesis: that Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny. This is the notion that the development of the individual reflects or imitates the development of it's entire ancestry. This idea originally referred to the development of embryos as a reflection of the evolutionary proccess of organisms. I actually learned it in a class on mythology, where we related cultural history and Jungian archetypes to [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, March 14th We were up at 3:00 AM and in a cab by 4:00, headed out to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi to see my parents. Nairobi is wicked cold in the mornings, and I was shivering all wrapped up in nerves while carrying my now-massive backpack into the airport. I saw my parents through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the arrival terminal and I was hit with a new load of conflicting emotions. It was something wonderful to see them here, safe, in Kenya with me and Chelly. It was something awful to know that my trip [View Full Entry]

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Chelly and I met on the Khao San Road in Bangkok, way back at the end of October. I moved in with her at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo the very next day and we spent Halloween night in our apartment watching The 40 Year-Old Virgin. That month we fell in love. My Thai visa expired, so I took a trip into Cambodia for two weeks. During that time, I decided that I never wanted to see another new place without Chelly by my side. We spent the next month planning a trip through India to Greece. After a bizarre Christmas [View Full Entry]

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On Safari Africa » Kenya » Tsavo National Parks E W By Mad Greek March 15th 2007 Nicholas John Nakis My folks arrived around 4:00 AM on a Wednesday morning, and we only had three days to show them Kenya. We started in Chelly's original hometown of Voi. Voi is a foothills town in the Taita Taveta corner of Coast Province--noted for its access to Tsavo East and Tsavo West, which together compose the largest wildlife park in Africa. After introducing all the parents to one-another and giving them the better part of a day to rest, we headed out into that park for [View Full Entry]

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