(Art by Jane Crowther)
Certainly the beginning of my day gave in no small hints how the end of my day would be. They often don’t. As I drove to work yesterday morning, I gazed at a glorious sky full of clouds touched by shadow with soft white and gentle yellows from the rising sunlight. I thought of the words of poet, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter Rabindranath Tagore, “Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.” Although in my head, I changed the sunset to sunrise. Perhaps I thought of his words because the anniversary of his birthday had been just the day before. He was an amazing and fascinating man, an incredible polymath, and the first non-European to win the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature.
If I stopped to think about it more closely, I can't recall a time when I wasn’t a nephophile, or someone who loves clouds. My children like to tease me about how many photos there are of clouds on my phone. As a child, clouds were those cartoon images of heaven with someone in a white robe and wings playing a harp. Clouds seemed like large, fluffy cotton balls that one wanted to bounce or sleep on. As children, when my parents took us to the mountains, we would open our car windows and reach outside to try to grab clouds. Bringing our hands back inside the car, we would carefully open our fingers to see and be disappointed by our lack of holding a cloud.
Clouds have been known to symbolize hope. They also represent the world between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent. They are in a state of metamorphosis, of things beyond our control. It makes me think of the early Christian mystic from the 14th century who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. He wrote that to know God meant one had to let go of one’s idea of God and be courageous enough to surrender to the realm of “unknowing,” where one might begin to glimpse the true nature of God.
I also thought of Paul Simon’s last album, Seven Psalms, in particular the opening track “The Lord,” in which Simon, like the Psalmists, compares the Lord to many different images:
The Lord is my engineer The Lord is the earth I ride on The Lord is the face in the atmosphere The path I slip and I slide on
It’s a gorgeous, deeply spiritual album where this incredible singer/songwriter wrestles with belief and unbelief as he nears the end of his life. It was an album whose title and lyrics came to him in dreams between the hours of 3:30 and 5:00 am.
“The Lord is the face in the atmosphere.” In the morning, these soft, gentle clouds amidst a blue sky and soft sunlight. By afternoon, this would change drastically, giving me a glimpse of some Old Testament God of the winds and storm.
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