clouds
CLOUDS

Sometimes it's hard to keep up with clouds. If you're really paying attention, the sky can convey certain simple but profound messages whose moment of most lucid expression passes within a second or two, even if the clouds aren't moving fast.

For example, one late afternoon this weekend, just for a moment, the clouds shown above were very expressive. Note that three different cloud levels are apparent. The ill defined white blob at the picture's bottom was at the lowest in elevation, since it covered the dark clouds, which overlapped the white ones at top center. This little cloud moved faster and formed and dissolved quicker than the rest. The dark, billowy clouds with white linings at mid level were the most expressive, bringing a shower a little later, and even a clap of thunder. Watching them, I visualized vast bubbles of warm, moist air gushing upward, rapidly cooling and condensing into violently churning fog of the kind I've flown through in a small airplane that bucked and thumped frighteningly, though those clouds had been less stormy-looking than these. Then at the picture's top center the thin layer of white clouds with diffuse edges are the highest, the calmest, the slowest moving, and there's just cold, blue sky beyond them ultimately yielding to the Universe at large.

To me, that late afternoon at my random little spot on Earth, it seemed that the clouds were talking about the three potential stages of a thinking human's spiritual journey.

The fleeting, ephemeral little scud-cloud at the bottom expressed childhood's perspective.

The dark but dignified mid-level clouds, on the one hand, brought to mind the sometimes upsetting, even ferocious inner conflicts of adults discovering their childhood beliefs and concepts to be inadequate; on the other hand, they also spoke of the soaring emotion and beauty attending the rational resolution of those conflicts during one's journey toward a more mature spirituality.

The top-level white clouds with diffuse borders represented our spiritual journey coming to an end. For, at the journey's end we find our own personal boundaries dissolving, our own sense of self-importance and separation from everything else in the Universe evaporating into the One Thing.

Like condensed molecules of water remaining part of the sky when the molecules detach from one another and the clouds dissipate, when we humans vanish from Earth, the essence of what we've been here remains with the eternal One Thing.