The Clouds Of Anaximander (Οι Νέφοι του Αναξίμανδρου)

-From The Meletic Tales.

In the gentle cradle of Miletus, where the sea reached the stone harbours and fig trees stretched towards the sloping sky, a young man named Kassandros wandered without genuine purpose but with a heart heavy with thought.

He had once studied numbers and forms beneath stern teachers, but the sharpness of scholastic learning no longer satisfied him. Lately, he had begun to wake in the hours before dawn, unsettled by dreams—dreams of clouds without shape, skies without horizon, voices whispering questions with no mouths to speak them.

One morning, whilst walking the northern path beyond the olive fields, Kassandros saw an old man seated upon a low wall, his back to the city, his eyes lost in the motion of the clouds. The stranger wore a robe of deep blue and bore no staff, no scrolls, only a small pendant carved with concentric circles.

Kassandros slowed his pace, compelled by something in the figure’s stillness. As he neared, the man turned and nodded. ‘You’re troubled’, said the old man.

Kassandros hesitated. ‘You read my face?’

‘No. The clouds told me', replied the stranger.

‘Are you a seer, then?’

‘No more than the fig tree is a prophet, but I observe—and remembering is another kind of vision man has at his disposal’.

Kassandros lowered himself to sit beside him. ‘Then tell me, what do you see?’

The old man pointed skywards. High above, streaks of vapour twisted like the threads of a spindle.

‘There is a lesson in their motion. One I learnt long ago, from my teacher— the man the city now calls a ghost: Anaximandros', said the old man.

Kassandros’ gaze sharpened. ‘You knew Anaximandros?’

‘I did. My name is Artemios, and long ago I studied beneath him when I thought the world could be explained with diagrams and measurements, but he taught me to look beyond form—to observe what cannot be held’.

‘What did he teach you of the sky?’ Asked Kassandros.

‘Not of the sky—of the Apeiron. The boundless. That which has no shape, no edge, and yet gives rise to all that does', Artemios replied.

Kassandros furrowed his brow. ‘How can something infinite give birth to the finite? Is that not a contradiction?’

Artemios smiled. ‘It is the first paradox—and the first harmony. Imagine a great mist. From it rise clouds. The clouds seem separate, but they are not. They are shaped by temperature, by wind and by height—yet they remain the mist, merely expressed. So it is with all things. We are temporary expressions of the infinite’.

They sat in silence as a breeze stirred the low grass. The scent of thyme drifted past them.

‘And is this what you believe still?’ Kassandros asked.

‘I believe in what I have observed. That all change is a return. That nothing is truly lost—only shifted. It was from this truth that I came to understand what is known as Meleticism’, Artemios responded.

‘You follow the way of the Meletic philosophers?’

‘Yes. But not as a religion. It is not something to kneel before. It is a practice. A deepening. It begins with awareness—of your breath, your body, your thoughts, your surroundings—and then moves outwards’.

Kassandros looked to the horizon. ‘Outwards to what exactly?’

‘To Ena—the One. Not a god. Not a figure, but the balanced source from which all flows and returns. Like the sea and the clouds. Like waking and sleep. All opposites complete each other’.

‘And where do I begin?’

‘You already have. You left the city. You questioned your certainty. You followed your unrest. That is the beginning. Now you must learn to listen closely. Your consciousness must be awakened', said Artemios.

For the days that followed, Kassandros returned to sit beside the old philosopher. Each time, Artemios shared no doctrine, but rather stories and images drawn from the world around them.

One morning, they sat in silence whilst a shepherd led his flock through the valley.

‘What do you see?’ Artemios asked.

‘A man guiding animals’, said Kassandros.

‘And what guides him?’

Kassandros paused. ‘The road’.

‘And what shapes the road?’

‘The land… the hills and stones that lie in the path’.

Artemios nodded. ‘He guides and is guided. This is the rhythm of Meletic thought. We act, but we are also shaped. We choose, but we are also carried. To see the world in this balance is to begin to know the Hyparxis—the presence of being in becoming that the Nous shapes into form'.

‘So being is not fixed?’

‘Nothing fixed can be alive. Life is motion, flow and transition. Even the soul is not a stone. It unfolds naturally'.

On the seventh day, dark clouds rolled across the sky, and thunder echoed in the distance. Artemios led Kassandros beneath the shelter of a vine-covered alcove and lit a small oil lamp.

‘Today, the sky teaches urgency. Let us sit and contemplate', he said.

They spoke of time, of the past that echoes in the present, and of the breath —how each inhalation was a rebirth, each exhalation a letting-go that introduced the eight states of meditation of Meleticism: the centre of the mind, detachment from the physical, profound concentration, balance, the transition into soul, the emanations of the flow, infinite consciousness, and finally, the enlightenment of awareness.

‘And is the last state… permanent?’ Kassandros asked.

‘No. Even enlightenment is a cloud. You may touch it, but cannot hold it. That is why humility must follow insight. Or the insight vanishes into pride’, Artemios confessed.

Rain began to fall softly, tapping the leaves like the fingers of an unseen god.

‘There is one last thing you must learn that death is not the enemy. It is merely change. The cloud becomes rain, the rain becomes river and the river becomes mist. None of it is lost’, said Artemios.

Kassandros closed his eyes, breathing in the scent of the earth, and for a moment, he felt something—not a vision, but a presence. He could not name it, only recognise it. The same feeling that had pulled him to the clouds weeks ago. The same feeling that had driven him from his old life. It was infinity, cloaked in simplicity.

When Kassandros returned to Miletus that summer, he was changed. He no longer sought fame or rhetoric. He lived quietly near the outer walls, where he planted olive trees and met with those persons who asked questions not to win, but to wonder.

He spoke of Artemios, and through him of Anaximandros, but more than that, he taught people to observe the clouds—not as actual signs from Olympus, but as lasting symbols of the eternal return to To Ena, the One.

He would often repeat a single phrase to those persons who doubted their place: ‘You are not separate from the One. You are part of its movement — as the wind is part of the sky’.

In the later years, when asked what Meleticism had given him, Kassandros would smile and answer: ‘It gave me back my breath’.

The seasons passed gently, like ripples on a still pond, and Kassandros, now living on the eastern edge of Miletus, found joy in a life stripped of ornament. His dwelling was small—a single room of stone and wood, a patch of herbs, and a bench beneath a pear tree. He taught none formally, yet many people came, drawn by word of mouth, or simply by the quietness they felt in his presence.

What astonished them most was not his eloquence, but his listening. Kassandros, like Artemios before him, had learnt to listen with the fullness of his attention—not waiting to reply, but waiting to receive.

Amongst those individuals who visited him was a curious pair: a former chariot merchant named Diomedes, and his daughter Dione, who was barely seventeen. Diomedes worn by years of trade and loss, admitted that he no longer knew what was worth seeking.

‘I’ve travelled as far as Karia and as deep as Thrace. And I’ve sold everything from wine to wheels, but now, silence is all that feels honest to me’, he said.

‘Then you have reached the doorway. You need only enter it', Kassandros responded.

Diomedes raised a brow. ‘And what lies on the other side if I may ask?’

Kassandros did not answer directly. Instead, he motioned for him to watch the way Dione stood near a bowl of water, silently tracing her finger in its surface.

‘There. That is the movement of the soul when it begins to see itself—not as separate, but as part of what moves all things’, he answered.

Dione turned and approached Kassandros. ‘My father says the world makes more sense with maps, but I think the sky is more honest than the earth. It does not pretend to stay the same in its form’.

Kassandros smiled. ‘The sky is the elder sibling of the mind. It too is full of shapes that come and go. Learn to watch it, and you will learn how to watch yourself’.

She asked, ‘Is that what Artemios taught you?’

‘He reminded me. The One speaks not in commandments but in cycles, in echoes and in breath. We do not learn truth as though it is foreign to us—we return to it’, Kassandros told her.

That night, they stayed beneath the stars, and Kassandros spoke of the ten levels of consciousness described by the Meletic path: from the awareness of To Ena, through the mind, the soul, the body, the universe, nature and flow, to the spheres, tranquility, and finally, enlightenment. He did not recite them as lessons. He described them as ripples, each flowing from the other, not as steps upwards, but as movements inwards.

‘Each level is not beyond you. It is within you, waiting to be recognised', he spoke.

Dione would remember that night for the rest of her life.

It was some months later when news reached Kassandros that Artemios had passed.

The messenger was a quiet boy from Teos names Dares, who had been sent by a group of young thinkers that Artemios had visited in his final years. He had passed beneath a cypress tree, seated in meditation, with a soft smile upon his lips.

Kassandros stood silently for a long whilst after hearing the news, looking not at the boy but at the drifting clouds above them.

‘He returned as he came’, Kassandros said gently. ‘With stillness and awareness’.

Later that evening, he sat alone and placed a single olive branch at the centre of his floor, as Artemios once did when honouring Anaximandros. He sat beside it, inhaled deeply, and began to recite—not aloud, but inwardly —the teachings passed from cloud to soul: ‘That which is without beginning is without end. That which returns is not lost. The One is not sought, but experienced. The breath is not owned, but borrowed. Let flow guide form, and let silence shape meaning’.

He did not mourn the man. Instead, he remembered the moment when Artemios had first turned to him and said, ‘The clouds told me’. That, he thought, was enough of an eternity.

In the years that followed, Kassandros quietly became what Artemios had been: not a leader, not a master, but a mirror for others to recognise themselves. It was not long before the phrase ‘to seek the clouds’ became a quiet expression amongst the curious youth of Miletus—a way of saying one had begun the journey inwards.

Some seekers came hoping for revelations. Others sought cures for grief, or relief from the burdens of wealth and title. One woman, Thera, a widow and midwife, confessed to Kassandros that she feared the moment she would die—not for her sake, but for leaving her children in a world so uncertain.

He told her this: ‘When the fruit falls, the seed does not end. Your children are not merely yours. They are of the world, of the One. The One does not abandon itself’.

She left with tears in her eyes—not of sorrow, but of true recognition.

In his seventy-third year, Kassandros felt the pull of stillness returning. He no longer rose early, nor tended the herbs as often, but he smiled more. He laughed more softly. He spoke less—yet his silence grew full of warmth.

He wrote no scrolls. The only mark he left was a smooth stone placed beneath his pear tree, inscribed with a single phrase: ‘Breathe—and let it pass’.

One late afternoon, as swallows arced above and the sun laid golden paths upon the sea, Kassandros sat beneath the same tree and closed his eyes.

A breeze stirred the leaves. A breath exhaled. And then came a gentle…stillness.

The story of Kassandros did not end with his death. Those people who had met him—even briefly—began to gather each spring beneath the pear tree. They brought no offerings, no garlands, no proclamations. Only themselves.

Some sat in silence. Others read passages written from memory about Artemios and about Anaximandros. One woman, an old Dione, now with hair the colour of mist, would recount her time tracing water in a bowl.

A child once asked her, ‘Were they sent by the gods?'

‘No. They were the semblance of the Nous', she said.

They etched no temple, built no shrine, but people began placing small round stones at the foot of the tree. Each one carried a word: ‘flow’, ‘presence’, ‘balance’, ‘return’, ‘awareness’. Each spring, the stones grew in great number.

One traveller from Cyrene took the tale to Egypt, where it was retold along the Nile. Another brought it to Rhodes, and then to Sicily. And in time, the name Kassandros came to mean not a man, but a moment—the moment when one stops seeking and begins to observe.

The Meletic way continued not through texts but through touch, breath, and being. Those people who followed it did not call themselves followers, but observers of the Meletic path.

When the clouds gathered over the Aegean, drifting slowly above the shores of Ionia, many persons who had heard the tale would look up and smile.

Not because they sought signs, but because they remembered: The cloud does not end. It simply changes form, and through it nature breathes.

As the years turned and empires shifted, the world outside Miletus became louder, faster, hungrier for monuments and certainties. Scrolls were copied by hands that had never felt the stillness of breath. Statues were raised for men who had never known the weight of a single thought.

The tale of Kassandros—through him, Artemios and Anaximandros—was never entirely lost.

It lived not in the grand libraries, but in the pauses between conversations. In the way a fisherman might stare at the horizon a moment longer than necessary. In how a mother might teach her child to sit with the wind before answering a question. It lived in the slow gaze. In the quiet nod. In the act of watching a cloud without naming it.

One day, a traveller from Delphi arrived in Miletus. He had heard whispers of a tree beneath which people gathered, not to speak, but to be. He sat there from dawn to dusk and, as evening fell, stood and whispered to no one in particular:

‘There is something here that has no name… and yet I know it’.

A boy beside the tree answered without looking up, ‘It is the same with the sky’.

Thus, it continued. Not as doctrine, but as drift. Not as commandment, but as consciousness. Not as memory, but as movement.

To Ena was not in a shrine. It was in the breath between all things, and
those individuals who remembered did not worship it. They simply observed as Meletics.

When the rains came, as they always did, no one sought shelter in haste. They let the droplets touch their skin, like forgotten messages from the sky. Some stood barefoot in the earth, eyes lifted. Others closed their eyes and listened.

It was said that in the sound of the falling rain, if one listened closely enough, they could hear the faint breath of Kassandros—not as a lingering spirit, but as a gentle rhythm, a reminder and a presence without form.

For the One was never far. It was only waiting to be noticed through the convergence, between the boundaries of the finite and infinite things of the cosmos.

In time, a few began referring to the place beneath the pear tree not as a shrine or a school, but simply as the space. Not ‘the grove of Kassandros’, nor ‘the stone of Artemios’, but the space— as if its value was not in what stood there, but in what was allowed to arise there.

Seekers came not to receive answers, but to discard questions. Some would bring objects—amulets, scrolls, charms—only to leave them at the edge of the clearing. By the time they left, they needed nothing.

Amongst them was a sculptor named Demokedes, who had once carved gods for temples. After sitting three days beneath the tree, he returned to his home and created a single work: an empty hand, open and upturned, carved in quiet marble.

He titled it: The Cloud Before It Forms.

Years later, when asked about it, Demokedes simply said, ‘It is not what I made. It is what is eternal beyond the image of the clouds'.

The Meletic way continued—not in argument, not in conquest, but in small awakenings passed from gaze to gaze, silence to silence.

Nothing built. Nothing broken. Just presence and the clouds.

Always the clouds—moving, changing and returning—like the thoughts of the One, drifting endlessly across the stillness of being.

When the last of the stones was laid in the shape of a gentle spiral near the tree’s roots, no one spoke. The gesture needed no explanation. It was not a tribute, but a reflection—of the soul’s path winding inwards towards To Ena, only to return again through others.

A child placed a single olive leaf in the centre of the spiral and said, ‘For the breath he left behind’.

As the dusk fell over Miletus, the clouds above shifted once more—not in warning, nor farewell, but in silent acknowledgment.

All understood. Without needing to speak a single word.

In that moment, even the breeze seemed to pause—as if the world itself had bowed its head in recognition. No temple bell rang, no priest intoned a name, yet something memorable had occurred. Those people who were present would carry it, not in words or relics, but in how they moved through life.

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