The Divine Message of Clouds
This is the summer of clouds.
As a child in New Orleans, I spent many hours lying in the backyard with my dog, Babs, (named after my brother’s current squeeze) staring up at the clouds. I didn’t have many friends nearby. My dog was not allowed to come inside the house, and that made me so sad that I spent hours alone with her outside.
These days, I walk with my dog, Summer (named for the season, I suppose, she came so named), every day in the neighborhood. Behind the school buildings down the block is a large open field for play and sports surrounded in the distance by forest and a few houses and low buildings. I have an unobstructed view of the dome of sky. On most humid days in summer, it is filled with enormous mountains of cloud. Late in the evening sometimes it is layered with low, dirty ones closer to the horizon followed by layers that increase in brightness tinged with gold and ultimately clear to an evening gray blue.
What I’ve thought of this summer, is how the clouds push against each other, either in an adagio motion on a hot still day, or faster together when a breeze is present. Once the motion begins, the shapes shift and change into the various animals and faces we guessed at as children. What the shapes will become once the motion begins, is out of the clouds’ control; they will be what they will become, without any outside influence other than humidity and air currents, and all the other things I know very little about but leave to those who study the weather.
Each living and non-living thing on earth, which includes each of us, our families and friends, our pets, the mosquitoes and the heat, the wind and the passing cars, exerts a force, psychic and physical. Once the force manifests, its energy becomes what it will become in the universe, and its effects often are never known.
Which is why I hope and desire and practice that the force of my psychic and physical energy, thoughts, words, actions, are connected to a divine force that works beyond my capacity to create. If my force is aligning with what is beautiful and good (even those things that I may perceive as not so) then perhaps I will have a positive effect on my little world. It is not my job or the clouds’ job to predict an outcome, or to judge an event, but only to align with something outside my small self that Sees the bigger picture, which I in my undeveloped human state, cannot pretend to See.
