Clouds and Cotton

I am not a big Joni Mitchell fan, especially after her diatribe against fellow folk musician Bob Dylan in her recent Los Angeles Times interview, but I do especially like her song, Both Sides Now, the one where she sings about clouds.

     "Bows and flows of angels hair
     And ice cream castles in the air
     And feathered canyons everywhere
     I've looked at clouds that way."

Those lyrics came to mind this morning as I set out on my bike commute from Novato to San Rafael. As I left our driveway and turned onto Washington Street, I looked up to see the sky filled with evenly-spaced cotton balls, all glowingly lit, but each with that singular dark outline you only get at sunrise or sunset. The sight gave me an ear-to-ear grin.

I think that the sky, in its many colors and forms, is one of this physical world's greatest gifts. To me, it represents change, hope, the limits of our existence, and our window into the infinite. The photographer in me appreciates the angular light when the sun peeks under lowering storm clouds, just as it sets. But I also like every other variation in the heavens. My father, who was also a photographer back in his heyday, used to point out the changing sky as we rode in the family car. I have done the same with my daughter from an early age, and she now appreciates the nuances of a yellow-green sunset and the sudden appearance "sun dogs" in the icy winter air. She loves a cloudy day.

When she was little, only four or five, she wanted desperately to go up into a cloud to see what it was like. She had seen lofty cumulous formations from her airplane window as we flew to her grandparents home in Idaho and I imagine she thought they would have the consistency of cotton candy. At times, I was tempted to drive her up to the high hills when low cloud cover obscured their peaks, but I hesitated because I was torn between reality and fantasy. Fortunately, fantasy won out. As the song says, "It's cloud's illusions I recall."

Last summer, while driving back from the funeral of my brother-in-law, Peter Scheideman, I was treated to a sky show that I'll never forget. The day had been an unusual one, the events of which I will share at another time. But as I drove away from the sadness of saying a final good-bye to Peter, dwelling on thoughts of death and impermanence, the sky seemed to have other ideas.

I left Eureka in eastern Nevada at about 5:30 pm, traveling west on US 50 (the "Loneliest Road in America"). But the long miles ahead became an afterthought as I was captivated by the weather. It seemed that every ten or fifteen minutes the sky transformed itself. There were sun showers, lightning storms, rainbows galore, moving curtains of misting rain, low light gilding the hills, brief intense downpours, and bright sunshine lighting up towering thunder clouds set against a deepening blue sky. I snapped dozens of mental postcard pictures as I made my way west towards Reno, wishing that I could have recorded it all.

As the miles ticked by, I began to feel that I was experiencing a sermon delivered through the medium of light and water and air. In my mind, it was saying, "You are not in charge here. You never have been. Life. Death. Those are only words chosen by you to try and make sense of what you can't possibly understand. Here's what we want you to do: Just sit back and enjoy the show." That sounded like good advice at the time, and it still does.