-The Stranger, Charles Baudelaire
I try to stop and look towards the heavens as often as possible. Its like instant meditation for my eyes. The sight of a beautiful sky lightens my heart and calms my soul. It makes me breathe in deeply and savor life, even if just for a second.
Apparently, I am not the only one who feels this way (not that I believed I was). There is actually a Cloud Appreciation Society. Their Mission Statement is truly lovely, here's just a snippet:
We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.
Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked. They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul. Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save on psychoanalysis bills.
I realized yesterday that I have a few favorite spots that I always stop at and look up whenever I am near them. There's a church steeple near my local library that seems to simply attract a beautiful sky behind it at all times. There's a restaurant patio where I nearly always see what I like to call "the hand of God" clouds-those absolutely beautiful cummulus clouds like the ones that Maxfield Parish captures in nearly all of his work.
There are skies that are burned in my memory and part of who I am. A sunrise when I was 16, an afternoon on a balcony in Rome, the clouds through the redwoods in Muir Woods. A night alone on a beach, the low clouds in my sisters backyard in Seattle.
They are illusive things, clouds. Tricks of light and vapor. Sometimes easy to photograph and paint, sometimes completely impossible to capture accurately.
One thing they almost always are is beautiful. Don't forget to look up. If you don't, you'll be depriving yourself of one of this worlds most beautiful, simple pleasures.
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