The Divine Message of Clouds

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.

A Mother's Prayer

A Mother's Prayer

for Katie

Forms change form yet light remains.

In the vast dome of robin's blue

Above my somber head,

In that abundant ocean of light,

vibrant clouds that float like fresh milk

I will see you. There. 

When darkness enfolds 

After shadows dissolve 

Sparks of gold appear.

In that shimmering presence, 

year after decade after century,

I will see you. There.

In the countless prickly needles of our lanky pines,

In the infinite white shells of Pontchartrain,

In the tender blades of grass that daddy tends

and the precious creatures that crawl 

beneath my feet or sing in dark forests,

I will see you. There. 

Forms change form yet light remains. 

You, Divine Light, have joined the sky and stars,

the sea and wood,

the swirl of endless life and love

that was,

In the beginning, 

is now,

and ever shall be.

Amen. 

I see you. There. 

Dancing Shadows

February 25, 2020

Waiting somewhere in the idling truck, a parking lot, just sitting, not doing anything at all, not looking at my phone or filing my nails, or listening to the radio, just sitting, waiting. I notice on the wall of the building, a nondescript blank beige stucco wall, shadows moving. It is cold and windy, the American flag above the building billows at full length, straight out, showing the full force of high-knot winds. Against the building the shadows dance. They are the shadows of trees except that in February the branches are bare and have their own peculiar shadows, traces and lines, intricate patterns. These lively shadows on the wall are not bare branches and I turn to find their source, but all I see are tall leafless cottonwoods, still as night. Yet there they are, the puppet-like shadows, of what I’m not sure but they draw me in, as though into another reality and “I” disappear. For only a few moments. I enter into the dance of the shadows, leave the truck, the parking lot, my husband, my world, behind. Empty. Part of a whole I don’t understand. An extraordinary moment in an otherwise unextraordinary day. My husband leaves the paint store and rejoins me waiting in the truck, sets his paint on the back seat, and we go on with the mundane tasks of shopping and eating and talking that make up the little moments of our lives, leaving the shadows behind to continue dancing whether I see them or see only the memory of them. Later in the day, I will recall the shadows, and reenter that state of emptiness, that otherworldly dance. It is a peaceful place to be.