I understood this in my wilderness and solitude. I lived in the wild forests of Samos, Greece, where the Borean warriors had left their dance and song. My illiterate peasant Greek grandmother told me “you must stay awake at the post of your life, for if you do not, they will take ALL your life”. Thomas Moore says that your life is like water in your hands and you must not let it slip through.

​When I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra I was back in the mountains of Samos. Nietzsche was a dancer. I have always danced when in pain and when in joy, for one would go mad without dance. Or as Nietzsche writes “without music, life would be a mistake”. Nietzsche is a dancer, always moving, always shaping, forming, taking one into places that others cannot capture or confine or imprison. Or as Helen Keller writes: “the most beautiful things, one cannot touch: they feel them with the heart”. Nietzsche takes one into the depths and labyrinth of the forming, destroying, creating self, the ownership of the self, or as Socrates said “to know thyself”. For if one does not know themselves, how can they be fully alive? Are they not full of doubts, fears, shadows and regrets, but are never in their lives? Or as my grandmother said “better to be on your feet for five minutes, than fifty years on your knees”. So, meeting Nietzsche in the spring of my life, was coming into the essence of a blood-family. 

George Seferis tells us, if one is meant to be free to be themselves, to form their character and to find their path and destiny, one must never be a sheep or a wolf. Nietzsche, in his work, also advocates for this agon (struggle; battle) to form your true nature and your true path. And since Nietzsche came before Seferis, I suspect he was also influenced by the “mad dancing feet” of Nietzsche. 

Years later when I studied Nietzsche at university level, I found he was more alive in his thinking than the actual university lecturer who tried to understand what he had not lived or experienced with his blood.​