Cloud watching

Here are the last few days of indulgent sitting, looking, musings before I must gather up my slow and scattered thoughts and compress them back into some form that fits better the pace and activity of a normal daily routine. For now though the Greek island of Amorgos looks back at me like a reflection of a daydream state: there's something very filmic about the empty, wild hills and cliffs and the huge expanse of blue below. 

Where Iceland's landscape was the element always in motion here on Amorgos it is the sky and light. The wind is a constant presence and it makes for incredible cloudscapes and a surreal sense of time speeding up in the unfurling and breaking apart of clouds just over your head and appearing to pause in the static hovering of cloud banks over the cliff tops; an in breath before promising to exhale down the rock face to the sea below. 

The rapid changes in the sky result in complete changes in colour palette in the landscape from one second to the next; moving from the familiar bleached blues of the Cyclades to deep greys and  saturated azure. I make a note to myself to double my efforts to find the right colours in a fineline pen....

The wind also makes itself know through the constant background score of rustling leaves, the drawn out hum of movement over the hills and its vocal journey through the flat-topped, blocky and tightly packed Cycladic architecture of the hilltop Chora where I am staying. It probably drives some people mad and certainly interrupts the opportunities for lizard-like basking in the sun but it is the reason I wanted to come back here. 

And I'm glad that I've come here now rather than at the beginning of my travels. It is most definitely the end of the season, probably beyond the end in fact. Almost all of the bars, cafes and restaurants are closing their doors one by one and starting the slow, careful and unrushed process of dismantling and cleaning, refurbishing and painting, like a boat in the yard for the winter, preparing for next summer. In a couple of days time I'll take part in the ritual of season change, closing the shutters on my own apartment and looking to see what an Edinburgh wind brings instead of an Amorgean one.