Cloud Watch

 Most of us don't pay much attention to clouds, but to me, they are my daily breakfast. Yes, I am retired and I take full advantage of it. Being a single, offers many benefits: do what you wish when you wish how you wish the way you wish. One of my "wishes" is to do what I did as a child: to play, to listen and read and snack and watch. I am done with protesting and serving and working and worrying, obligations and friendships and relationships or any other kinds of ship. I like being alone and in that, not thinking about what loneliness means. Loneliness is very much of one's own doing. There are alone benefits such as cloud watching, that cost nothing but give a lot. Even working people can do it if they try. Every morning, I am an early riser, I take the cup of coffee with honey and cream and sit on my little deck in my swinging basket chair and look up. I am not in a marble glass concrete structure but in an old, bit tacky one I love, and I do look mostly at the back of another building, but from my deck, I have a lovely wide and long patch of sky with ten gorgeous tall cedars and firs poking above. I call them my sentinels because where I live on a hill top above the sea, they are some of the few left to protect us from Pacific winds. Today, for example, there is storm brooding. It isn't in full roar but the great trees are bending and bowing to it, the firs are dancing. And above in the sky I see flying past, gigantic dinosaurs of unknown kind, dragons and monsters and strange fish made of cloud. They come from the sea and their changing shapes and forms sail past while a few braver gulls and small flocks of crows are brave enough to try out the wind's invisible demands. Yesterday, a perfect vee of geese or swans or some other sizeable bird flew in a determined shape northward and thrilled me to know it was fall here and now. When I was a kid, right before becoming an adolescent, I used to lie on a small mountain of moss covered granite on my grampa's farm in Haney, and look up at the sky wondering what my life would be. Now four decades later, I remember that moment and those clouds, as if it were yesterday. What did that child know what was to come: the births, the places, the people, the work, the deaths and divorces and dark times and most of all the joyous, beautiful ones? And here I am now, watching clouds and wondering how many people think of looking at them for longer than "looks like rain today" or "oh boy, it's a day for golf". Taking time to watch a cloud go from your horizon, left to right and then pick up another batch heading in the same direction, giving the shapes names and fantasy destinies  is a form of meditation that fades out problems and pain. It gives you a holiday from what stress you created for yourself, and takes you to places you didn't think you owned. In our very heads we have endless entertainments ready to be picked up and explored and clouds help us do just that. If we let it. Cloud watching is a little like trying out walking in snow or standing in the rain naked, or lying on your back in a grassy field and breathing everything around you and listening to the quiet. There's far more to life when you take twenty minutes of your life and try just being. Outside the tower you work in, or at your desk or in the classroom or factory or shop or restaurant, there is another life for you. It's up there in the sky. Your clouds await.