AFTERNOON CLOUDS

Nowadays as the dry season weighs ever heavier on the land and we approach the hottest month of May, most early mornings are cloudless and the skies deep blue. By late morning white, cottony cumulus clouds float peacefully in the blue. As the afternoon progresses, clouds grow in number and size, the blueness pales, and by 2PM the thermometer in the porch's shade reads 95-100°F (35-38°C). That's a good time for sitting still and looking around. Often, I look at clouds.

Clouds can be thought about in all kinds of ways, but these days my mind has been flitting around one certain notion. That is, that always the sky's air is occupied with molecules of water, but we don't see the water until its molecules condense into clouds. In other words, we don't notice the water until its molecules rearrange themselves into patterns more complex than general diffusion.

What's interesting about this formula of increasing complexity of pattern leading to a more noticeable phenomenon is that it takes into account an observer who notices.

Of course, it's a child's belief that clouds might form in a summery afternoon sky at least partly to be admired by an observer such as myself. However, in a Universe where the same Creative Impulse creates both clouds and child, is the thought to be rejected off-handedly?

In fact, now in my gray-beard days, afternoon clouds set my thoughts dancing around a certain irrational and unprovable, but very appealing, idea, one as agreeable as a mid-afternoon breeze. Here it is:

There's just one observer to everything -- everything -- and what's observed is being magically conducted from an infinity of nerve-ending-like sensors -- sensors like you and me -- to the single Universal Consciousness.

Are you and I not like taste buds on the Universal Observer's tongue?

And, doesn't this concept suggest that it might be OK for a fellow to sit around on a hot, tropical-dry-season afternoon doing nothing but admiring clouds, and feeling glad for any friendly breeze that comes along?