Skies Above

Today, I just took pictures of clouds. It kind of hit me all of a sudden how big they are; almost like floating mountain ranges—their gargantuan bulk capable of undergoing moment-to-moment changes that would occupy their terrestrial counterparts for hundreds of millennia, and all of this silently, crawling over a faded blue mantle without a whisper.

I stressed my telephoto lens, trying to capture the bestial precipices and all their danger: the milk-white cliff faces no climber would ever ascend. At one point I just lay on my back, letting vertigo crawl into my head. My whole body seemed to implode at the suggestion of scale. Imagining my tiny body in proximity to those sky hooks begs innumerable questions. Where else could the throne of Thor be found? What less marvelous thing could bear the name “cumulonimbus”? Is there any other eruption of natural forces that could possibly (nay, that could deserve to) be the genesis of that life-giving lightning that splits the iron gray sky?

Today I shouted those questions toward the shrinking horizon. Today I fell in love again, and my new love is the multitudinous, hulking Vapor Queen of the sky. We all stand trapped between the grassy carpet of our sphere and the ever-changing shell of her cottony cloth.