I always carry a small notebook with me and yesterday I went through several of them copying down information I wanted to keep into what I call my 'catch-all' notebook.
I came across a page or two I had written when my husband Barry was dying in February 2016. The idea of micri and megali came into play in that experience. I was focussed on being with him in the hospice and the minutiae of his care and the intensity of being totally in the moment. But on the way to and from the hospice which was a journey by car, bus and ferry, I was intensely conscious of the much much bigger picture - of our small place in the vastness of the universe. Here is what I wrote -
As Barry is dying I notice how brilliantly starry the nights are, how big the moon, how frosty the mornings, and how beautiful the dawns. I open the window to the night to hear with wonder the last melancholy trill of the curlew and the first cry of the owl. Early one morning I walk down the path to the water's edge and see the biggest flock of gulls I have ever seen rise into the air and cross the bay without their usual raucous cries but in utter silence except for the sound of hundreds and hundreds of wingbeats.
It was as if the tiny things, the micri, and the vast things, the megali, were heightened to an extreme - and the in between things hardly existed and were passing in a blur of sorrow and pain.
The nights are still starry, the mornings frosty and the dawns beautiful.
I'm taking a blog break till the end of the month now.
Thank you, as ever, for reading.
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