A video poem by Patty Mooney, free to watch
A conversation with the goddess on Mount Olympos
In 1994, filming Full Cycle: A World Odyssey, Patty Mooney went up the mountain looking for Athena, goddess of wisdom, courage and reason. A lean black dog with bared fangs met her instead.
Watch the filmThe coincidence does not escape notice.
Watch Dear Athena
Free to watch, no sign-up needed.
No helmet, no armor, no thunderbolt. Athena never appears on command, but she may have been there all along.
How the trek unfolds
Dear Athena is a wry, contemplative address to the goddess. The pilgrimage doesn’t go as planned, and that turns out to be the point.
The climb
She treks toward Olympos hoping for some trace of the goddess: a sign, an oracle, anything.
The black dog
A lean black dog with bared fangs barks and clamors at her feet. She scrambles onto a pile of rocks where mountain water crosses the trail and waits.
DOG spelled backward is GOD
From the top of the rocks, an observation too peculiar to ignore.
Golden blossoms
A butterfly settles on the wildflowers. Clear water runs through the stones. Eventually the dog retreats, and she climbs down to keep exploring.
The crystalline spring
She bends to drink from a mountain spring. And that, unexpectedly, is enough.
Somewhere between DOG and GOD, wisdom may have a sense of humor.
Why it matters
Dear Athena explores an old human impulse: going into nature looking for signs, answers and an encounter with something greater than ourselves.
What begins as a pilgrimage becomes something less predictable. The goddess never materializes. The traveler meets fear, beauty, absurdity and, finally, water.
The poem finds meaning without insisting on an explanation. Was the dog a warning? Was the butterfly Athena’s touch? Was the spring merely a spring? The unanswered questions are part of the experience.
With its mix of classical mythology and American trail-side irreverence, the film finds humor in the gap between the revelation we expect and the one nature actually provides.
About the film
The footage comes from the Greece leg of Full Cycle: A World Odyssey, when Patty Mooney and Mark Schulze rode from the streets of Athens to the slopes of Mount Olympus.
- Form
- Video poem
- Written and created by
- Patty Mooney
- Filmed
- Mount Olympus, Greece, 1994
- Genre
- Video poetry, Americana, Greek mythology, nature, adventure, personal essay
- Studio
- New & Unique Videos®
- To watch
- Free, on this page
More free films
- Bicycle Friends
- Love Lives in Us
- Sally Ride’s Astral Dream
- Shark Rock
- The Sinking of the Yukon
- Smokey in the Basket
See them all on the Music Films page, or follow the whole 1994 journey in Full Cycle: A World Odyssey.
Patty Mooney and Mark Schulze are San Diego filmmakers and the co-founders of New & Unique Videos®, making independent films since 1985.