This morning we decided to stay where we are, on our mystical voyage around the Greek islands by sailboat. It’s so ridiculously beautiful that leaving after only a day seemed like an act of supreme madness. There is a monumentally large, tree-covered semi-circle of rock, encasing within it an idyllic and well-sheltered town, known as Kiparissia, of white houses, blue shutters and terracotta tiles on the roofs that pop up from the tree-line subtly and the sky is cloudless allowing the bright sun to shine with almost sensual ease onto the long beach coastline of small grey and black and white stones, where a few people are camped out in a tent and currently swimming in the cool and refreshing sea. On the shore there are classical Greek cafes full of elderly women and men playing tavli, drinking traditional Greek coffee and talking in low voices, gesturing the contents of their mind into primitive and effective visual strokes of their wrinkled limbs.
The boat is rocking lazily by the key-side where an old and wise man is teaching his young granddaughter to fish; he deserving the appellation ‘wise’, in my mind, really because of how magnificent his technique is and also because somewhere in the rugged curls of his grey beard I felt there was a vast ocean of experience and truth and also a nourishing of his animalistic and tender soul as a result of living within such sublime beauty; the kind of natural beauty that puts your mind – and, in fact, your whole body as a writhing organism – into a state of trance-like calm and gently but firmly beckons the realisation that the universe is vast and complex and within its chaotic order our little earth can seem to stand still for just a fleeting moment, within which the silence – that descends and envelops your weary soul – speaks infinite bounds of whispers and visions intertwined and, in doing so, serenades you into the awareness that time is so incomprehensibly titanic, that really we are experiencing the world in hyper-slow-motion, but from the grand cosmic perspective all we do experience is a blink of an eye, a snap of the fingers, a solemn tick of a clock, a snap of an elastic band, a breaking of a twig, a crunch of arid leaves on a romantic autumnal morning, a tap of a dissonant piano key, which to us feels like an eternity, until we reach the end of our journey through life, at which point we realise only too late how brief a period of time it truly was.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou