Cumulus Congestus (Wikipedia)

ClOUDS are cheap. We don’t pay a dime for them. We take them for granted or, even worse, misunderstand them.

They entertain and enshadow, magnifying to immense proportions the proposition that life is ever-varying shades of grey. Boredom is just a state of mind — not reality — when clouds are in the sky.

The plumes, puffs, phantasms and pillows parade across the local heavens. Few days are completely bereft of clouds in May and June, at least where I live. Brides keep planning their weddings as if thousands of June weddings hadn’t been obscured and dampened by banks of Cumulonimbus. This is cloud-denial, a common psychological condition. Cloud deniers always act surprised when spring is cloudy. They have a fixed, illusory image of a cloud-free spring — a delusion resistant to all past experience. Spring propagandists, including many poets, have spread this myth.

May skies are sometimes so overcast we turn on the lights during the middle of the day. Cumulus clouds are to June what snow is to January. They accumulate in the lower atmosphere and sometimes extend in massive, vaporous monuments upward into the stratosphere. Cumulus mediocris look like shredded cotton balls. Cumulus humilis are more reminiscent of clotted cream. Cumulus congestus create muscular heros, suggestive of so many shapes it is not surprising Zeus was believed to create the image of his wife, Hera, out of a cloud. (The cloud was violated and Centaurus was conceived.)

Each Cumulus cloud is “the visible summit of a towering transparent column of air – like a bright white toupee on a huge invisible man.” So says Gavin Pretor-Pinney in his wonderful book, The Cloudspotters Guide: The Sciene, History and Culture of Clouds. Clouds satisfy both the scientist and the artist. The scientist looks at the shapes in the sky and has the urge to measure droplets. He is a cloud-demystifier. The artist sees castles and ascending saints. He is a cloud-mystifier. Clouds make him depressed when he is depressed and jubilant when he is happy. They intensify his inner condition.

I once lived in a place that was not cloudy for a single day for two months. It was a living hell. There was nowhere to hang your thoughts.

Thank you for clouds, God. Unappreciated and vilified, they are loftier than we.

………

(From a post of 15 years ago — before aerosol sprays altered our skies.)

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