And Then There Were Clouds

Trio of Clouds, c Sukie Curtis, 2010, 5x5 each, oil on wood

What can I say but that I love clouds? Unapologetically. 

After all, I am a certified member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. And I find clouds endlessly fascinating and entertaining in their variations of form, color, density, changeability. 

Sometimes I wish I could hold them from shifting shapes quite so fast, and yet that's part of the nature of clouds to be always changing, fleeting, transitory, impermanent, ephemeral. And thus, fun to watch!

(Did you know that word "ephemeral" is built of two Greek words--the preposition epi meaning "on" or "at," and the word (h)emera meaning "day"? So ephemeral means on a day, or fleeting, etc. That was one of my brightest, most exciting "aha" discoveries taking New Testament Greek in seminary thirty (gulp!) years ago.)

A few weeks ago on a random morning, I happened to look at the sky over our neighbors' house across the street and saw some great cloud formations, and I decided to paint them as quickly as I could. Fortunately I had three small (5x5") wood panels all primed and undercoated with a rosy tone, so I brought my paint, my brushes, solvent, and the three panels out to the small stoop in front of one of our doors. Spread some newspaper on the porch beside me, just in case, donned my apron and went to work. 

Quick work. You have to work very quickly if you're trying at all to paint what's before your eyes when it comes to clouds (or nearly any other weather-related or sunlight-related phenomenon in a place like Maine). 

Of course there comes a time when you are no longer painting the cloud itself, which has morphed through several new stages in the time it has taken you to mix a color of paint. But some concoction of the actual cloud as it was, the way it remains in your memory and imagination, and the actual cloud as it is now and is fast becoming (I will resist saying--well, apparently not!--"as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be..."--what a preposterous idea of changlessness and immutability.)

But I don't set out to paint exact likenesses when I paint anyway. If I were after that, I'd take a photograph, and even with photography there's lots of choosing going on to make up a photo--a kind of editing of subject even before the photo gets taken.

As a more experienced painter once said to me, "All paintings, no matter how representational they aim to be, are abstractions." Fictions, we might say.

Especially so if the painter in question is as much interested in her/his own response to what is seen and to the amazement, delight, elation (or, legitimately, sadness, longing, poignance) stirred up in the one seeing. 

Which reminds me of something I've read attributed to Alexander Calder: "My method of working? I begin with elation." To which I say, count me in.

PS. I had intended to sell the three cloud pieces as a trio, but I have since sold one (the one on the right) to someone who admired that one. The others are still available. And I plan to do more.

A Wu Wei Kind of Day

This morning I had an early appointment out of the house, which meant that I enjoyed the immense gift of being in the car driving past east-facing vistas as the sun was rising. When I left home there were pink clouds strewn across the sky; that was beauty enough all by itself.

My first view of the water showed intense gold gathering along the horizon where some small clouds were clustered, right where the sun would soon appear. I'm sure you've noticed how clouds  a sunrise or sunset all the more interesting and often more beautiful. I turned off the radio and CD player so that there's be fewer distractions from the primary event of the sun's rising (and the small matter of keeping the car in the appropriate lane going about the right speed).

And then came the sunrise itself--since I was alone I greeted the sun aloud without apology or inclination to feel foolish. I thanked the sun for its energy and warmth and for making life on earth possible. The moment of sunrise wasn't particularly dramatic, nor was it any more glorious that what had come before (it was all plenty glorious). But sometimes it's good to speak to the sun directly. At least I happen to think so.

My appointment was an energizing conversation with Susan Doughty of the New England WomenCenter. Susan is a visionary women's health care practitioner whose center bridges western and alternative approaches to healing. She told me about documented (even videotaped!) evidence of the principles of quantum physics at work healing disease, even at the level of cellular repair.

What she was telling me echoes what I've been hearing and reading from a variety of sources about the power of imagination and vision to create and to change our realities (providing we loosen our energetic grip on limiting beliefs and paradigms). Even Einstein almost a century ago could see the power of the imagination to move and shift energy (and everything in the universe is composed of energy, all vibrating at differing frequencies) and to get us places that logic just can't manage.

As I was leaving, Susan shared with me some of her own experience that so often we get where we want to get not through struggle, blood, sweat, and tears (I know, I know--it's not what we grew up hearing) but rather by holding a clear, full vision of where we want to be, what we want to have accomplished, how we want to be in the world, trusting that in some corner of the universe it is already a reality, and by doing our best to stay "in the vortex" (her words for it), in the flow of energy, of the river of life, not resisting but "going with the flow". It doesn't mean that we remain passive and take no action at all, but that we take actions that are in some sense "effortless". What she was saying is closely related to the Taoist principle of "Wu Wei"--literally, without doing, without effort, sometimes expanded to "doing without doing."

So there I was, driving home again, minding my own business on the highway, when I noticed the license plate of a car that passed me. It said: WU WEI. Who am I to argue with that?

Delight at Kidney Pond

What can I say? During our recent three day stay at Kidney Pond in Baxter State Park, I really got into clouds in a big way. Which was a good thing, since there were a lot of clouds around, and when they mingled with sunlight it was especially easy to enjoy their shapes, colors, and movements.

And as you can see from the photos above, I really got excited by what the pond (lake, really) waters did with the colors of the sky, the various shades of cloud color, its own transparency to the pebbly bottom, and the nearly constant motion of small waves toward the shore at my feet.

So I took several photos. Well, more than several. I even took my first ever videos using Anna's basic point and shoot digital camera. (If I've ever used a video camera before, I'm forgetting. We've never owned one, I know that much.) They may not be prizewinners, but I had a huge amount of fun taking them and just basically dancing with delight noticing the patterns!

Here are just a couple of my color-patterns-on-the-water photos. Just to get me back into the bloggerhood.

Appreciating Clouds

Yesterday while Bekah and I were eating our lunch in the sun on our steps, I noticed this "rainbow cloud" above our neighbors' house (toward the west-southwest). Bekah ran inside to grab a camera and took several shots. 

The colors of the rainbow were brighter than they appear in this photo. I don't believe I've ever before seen a cloud bearing rainbow hues in quite this way. The cloud moved southward across the sky rather quickly, spreading out as it moved. But the colors never left it. As you can see in the photo, there were other clouds in the predominantly clear sky, all of them normal "white" ones. I suppose there must have been just the right form of moisture in or near this one cloud formation to create the rainbow.

Appropriately, first thing yesterday morning on the BBC's "World" radio program, and again in the afternoon on "The World" from WGBH Boston, I heard about the Cloud Appreciation Society in the United Kingdom. So I attempted to join up! Soon I hope I'll have a spiffy certificate to show for it.

I do enjoy and greatly appreciate clouds and their intriguing and ever-changing shapes and colors. At the same time, in light of the loss of the Air France Airbus jet over the Atlantic yesterday, I feel moved to remember that clouds are not just "pretty things".  Sadly, some clouds carry murderous weather conditions.