"I've looked at clouds…"

"I've looked at clouds
from both sides now,
from give and take..."
- Joni Mitchell

I live along a river valley that runs between two mountain ranges. Each morning I rise, fill the bird feeders, water the flowers and return to the kitchen where I make a pot of tea. Then I spend a few hours studying spiritual texts, taking calls, and staring.  Yes, staring.

I've always been fascinated by clouds. As a child I couldn't wait to finish my chores and retreat to read. If the weather was inclement, I would go to my room, climb into my bottom bunk and disappear into a story about horses, a Nancy Drew mystery, a biography about strong women, or a book of fantasy. If the weather allowed, I would grab a book and head for a grassy place to lie on my back and alternate between reading words and reading clouds.

I loved watching a cloud change shapes -- from a bunny, to a dragon, to a castle -- and so on. The first time I heard Joni Mitchell's,"Both Sides Now," I thought it was the most brilliant song ever penned.

These days, I don't have to lie in the grass to watch clouds. All I have to do is look out our floor to ceiling windows, where I have a stretch of sky that reaches about 50 miles along the valley -- from north to south. I can watch a single cloud shift shape dozens of time. I can watch her start out as a puffy little thing, and over the course of a few hours, turn into a pouty, storm-sodden promise full of rain.

One day, as I watched a cloud morph, over, and over again, I realized that "the cloud" I'd been watching -- and which I'd identified as "that cloud," -- was not the same cloud, at all. Fifth grade earth science had taught me that throughout the morning, the sun had caused water molecules to evaporate up from puddles, lakes, rivers, streams, and back into the atmosphere. From there, they'd then been gathered (or condensed) into clouds. But all the while, as each cloud gathered new molecules of water, other water molecules were being released back into the atmosphere. There was a constant, ongoing exchange of water molecules.

The cloud that I had been watching move from the north earlier that morning, was actually not the same cloud I saw later in the afternoon. Even though I thought I'd been monitoring its southbound progress -- and its ever-changing shape -- there were probably very few water molecules left of what had started out as "that cloud" earlier in the morning.

And for that matter, what constituted "that cloud" anyway?  How was it so different from the atmosphere it seemed to be traveling through. The same molecules that made up that beautiful blue sky, made up the cloud. All that was different, was density. What I thought of as an outlined shape, was actually, in a constant state of transformation -- continuously changing and shifting.

For me, this realization felt -- in ways that are hard to explain -- like I finally understood Life. I could see that the atmosphere which seemed so invisible, became more visible when gathered into a denser form -- not a different substance -- just a different density. The essential elements that made up the atmosphere -- and the cloud -- were interchangeable, and changeless.

I had to ask myself, "how is this different from what I think of as my body -- a body in which each cell is replaced every seven years?" Could this be what Mary Baker Eddy is referring to in her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, when she says:

"Spirit, God, gathers unformed thoughts
into their proper channels
and unfolds these thoughts…
in order that their purpose may appear"  

and that:

"Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts
and replace the objects of material sense
with spiritual ideas." 

Gathering and resolving, gathering and resolving...

As Joni sings:

"something's lost,
and something's gained,
in living every day..." 

I couldn't help but think of God as the atmosphere -- invisible, but ever-present. And everything we experience -- bodies, trees, houses -- as clouds. Constantly gathering into forms that allow the atmosphere to express a new sense of purpose -- to provide shade, to move moisture from north to south -- or east to west, to sort sunlight into a rainbow of hues, to resolve into much-needed rain -- in short, to bless.

I could actually feel the give and take of being spiritual -- and yet, having form -- without the membrane of duality. To be as at-one with God, as the cloud is one with the atmosphere it travels through, and exists in.

There is so much more I am learning from clouds. But for tonight -- this begged sharing.

offered with Love,

Kate

"I really don't know clouds, at all..."

"I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
from up and down and still somehow,
It's clouds illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all..."

I have so many stories associated with Joni Mitchell's song, "Clouds."  But today, when I saw this photo on Facebook, and the following description, I realized how true it is.  I really don't know clouds...at all.  The description read:   

"A Dutch artist named Berndnaut Smilde has figured out how to create a white cloud in the middle of a room. This requires careful regulation of humidity, temperature and light. Once conditions are perfect, he uses a fog machine to create the cloud."

It made me laugh out loud.  It was the perfect depiction of what I seemed to be experiencing.

I was sitting in my office all morning, feeling as if I was on the verge of an emotional downpour.  I couldn't pinpoint which direction the storm was blowing in from, but it was looming on the horizon.

Then, one little trigger and the tears started falling.  When pressed for a "reason," it all came rushing in.  A recent incident, the fragile emotional season,  memories associated with a similar experience...they were all there.  The ego (or mortal mind) had been perfecting the atmosphere, just waiting for just the right conditions to introduce a trigger...and voila, what looked like a real cloud ready to dump a downpour of tears into the middle of the room.

Mary Baker Eddy, in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, states:

"Disease arises,
like other mental conditions,
from association."

I like thinking of disease...as any dis-ease -- mental, emotional, financial, relational, physical, etc. -- that would suggest God, Love, is not the only Cause and Creator...of anything.

In an attempt to forward it's story of our isolation from God's allies -- either as victim or perpetrator -- the ego dips into the muckery of regret, guilt, "what if," and "why, oh why..."  

From there, it gathers the right atmospheric elements -- mistakes, choices, fears, doubts, anger, hurt -- and sets up the perfect environment for blowing in the fogginess of self and separation.  A perfect storm. 

 The past contributes regret, the future its imaginings, and blow in a little meaningless incident or chatter, and it's a swirling nor'easter.

Yup, that's how it works...a cloud in the middle of your office ready to break into torrents of anger, a downpour of tears...bearing down in sideways sheets of misunderstanding.

But, we are not victims.  We can know what is going on.  

When the humidity in the room begins to skyrocket with a heavy sense of emotional vulnerability, or the barometric pressure of spiritual charity dips into the single digits of "me, my, mine" -- open the windows.  Turn on the fan which Eddy defines, in Science and Health, as: 

"the separator of fact from fable;
that which gives action to thought." 

...and change the atmosphere.   When we open our hearts to the freshness of divine inspiration, the ego can't create a cloud of self and sin.   Those false elements can't find ways to associate themselves into reasons for sadness, regret, guilt, or sorrow, when we stir the environment with Truth.

Just a thought...

 shared with Love,

Kate

And if you love the original Joni version of "Both Sides Now" here is a link that includes a bonus...the original "Circle Game" at the end. Enjoy.

"It's cloud's illusions I recall..."

"Bows and flows of angel hair
and ice cream castles in the air;
and feather canyons everywhere,
I've looked at clouds that way.

But now they only block the sun,
they rain and snow on everyone.
So many things I would have done
but clouds got in my way.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
from up and down, and still somehow,
it's cloud illusions I recall.
I really don't know clouds at all."

Bows and flows of angel hair...does anyone say it better than Joni?  Looking at clouds, love, and life from "Both Sides Now" is a concept that I have waited over 40 years to understand.  But, I think I caught a glimpse of something recently. An insight that holds so much promise, so much hope, for me, that I almost dare not speak it...

Memories...we love them, we don't...we love them, we don't.  They define us, they haunt us.  They seem to hang on to us, like the fangs of a snake one minute, and we hang on to them like a loved talisman the next.  Our relationship to memories, are as complicated and convoluted as sibling rivalry, or passive-aggressive behavior...we wonder if we are actually going crazy when we experience their subjectivity.

But there is a way of thinking about memories that frees us from the twisted insanity of their haunting.  There is a way of experiencing our remembered moments that is as full of joy and sweetness as a breath of spring.

Alan Lightman, in his small, but profoundly thought-provoking book, Einstein's Dreams, allegorically explains how Einstein may have explored various models of time, as he penned his "theory of time."  He walks us through time that meanders, time as a locality, time as a sensory experience, and time as memory.  In a chapter titled, "27 June 1905,"   Lightman sets up the memory-based model of time with this story:

"Every Tuesday, a middle-aged man brings stones from the quarry east of Berne to the masonry of Hodlerstrasse.  As he passes people on the street, his eyes are on the ground.  Some people know him, try to catch his eye or say hello.  He mumbles and walks on.  Even when he delivers his stones, he cannot look the mason in the eye.  Instead he looks aside, he talks to the wall in answer to the mason's friendly chatter, he stands in a corner while his stones are weighed.

"Forty years ago in school, one afternoon in March, he urinated in class.  He could not hold it in. Afterwards he tried to stay in his chair, but the other boys saw the puddle and made him walk around the room, round and round.  They pointed at the wet spot on his pants and howled.  That day the sunlight looked like streams of milk as it poured whitely through the windows and spilled onto the floorboards of the room.  Two dozen jackets hung from the hooks beside the door.  Chalk marks stretched across the blackboard, the names of Europe's capitals.  The desks had swivel tops and drawers.  His had "Johann" carved in the upper right. The air was moist from the steam pipes.  A clock with big red hands read 2:15.  And the boys hooted at him, hooted at him as they chased him around the room, with the wet spot on his pants.  They hooted and called him, "bladder baby, bladder baby, bladder baby."

"That memory has become his life.  When he wakes up in the morning, he is the boy who urinated in his pants.  When he passes people on the streets, he knows they see the wet spot on his pants. He glances at his pants and looks away....

"But what is the past?  Could it be, the firmness of the past is just an illusion?  Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images, that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought?

"In a world of shifting past, one morning the quarry man awakes and is no more the boy who could not hold it in."

Oh my goodness.  Do you know how it felt to read this for the first time?  It was like glimpsing the very moment when a golden ray of sunlight breaks through heavy black storm clouds, and arcs the sky with a rainbow of colors so new, so surprising, that they have yet to be named. 

Lightman then reflects:

"In a world of shifting past, memories are like wheat in the wind, fleeting dreams, shapes in clouds.  Events, once they have happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night.  In time, the past never happened.  But who could know?  Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant..."

This was a deeply forgiving paradigm shift for me. 

As most of you are well-aware, I have a photographic memory.  How else could I recall the minutiae of detail from my own life's stories with so much specificity in this blog.  But, and this is a big but, this same level of recall has also felt like a curse at time.  Besides having a photographic memory, I also have a very visceral emotional memory.  When I remember life events...big and small...I not only recall the details of color, smell, and taste, but the deep emotions experienced as well. It is sometimes as if a wave of memories is crashing over my present, and pulling me out to a roiling sea of sorrow in its undertow.

At other times,  these memories seem to "set up" my present and future experiences in a way that undermine any opportunity to "be new" in Christ.  Much like the stonecutter in Lightman's story I have lived my life as a prisoner of past events.  When I would see my present through the lens of a mistake, accident,  life-transforming, or compelling event, I couldn't look up into the eyes of my future with even a modicum hope that genuine innocence, or forgiveness, could ever be mine.

But, when I look at my life through this new lens of "shifting cloud" images, experience that take shape for a moment...dark and lowering in one instant, fluffy and childlike the next...I am able to benefit from the filtered sunlight, cooling shade, bright rays that ripen tomatoes, and gentle rains upon the tender herb...each in their moment of appearing.   By allowing these "clouds" to shift into the next blessing, without letting them define my past, present, or future...or anyone else's, for that matter...I can live with wonder, and stand in awe of God's ever-evolving creation of individual and collective good.

In this space of "shifting clouds," the shapes that are a delightful bunny one moment, or a fire-breathing dragon the next, inform rather than define, what I experience.  I am able to see that those shifting moments are as subjective as the "eye of the beholder" and that my "eye" can always be in synch with the heart of Christ which is always focused on God's face.

In their biography of Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Healer, Yvonne von Fettweiss and Robert Warnack  write that Eddy once offered her "household worker," Adelaide Still, a glimpse through this lens of Spirit.  Still shares:

"On several occasions I saw Mrs. Eddy dispel a storm; the first time was on August 3, 1907, in the late afternoon. 

"The sky was overcast and it was very dark.   Mrs. Eddy sat in her chair in the tower corner of her study, watching the clouds with a smile and a rapt expression on her face.   She seemed to be seeing something beyond her present surroundings, and I do not think that she was conscious of my presence.

"In a few moments the clouds broke and flecked, and the storm was dissolved into its native nothingness.   About have an hour later I took her supper tray to her, and she said to me, "Ada, did you see the sky?" I replied, "Yes, Mrs. Eddy."   The she said, "It (meaning the cloud) never was;  God's face was never clouded."

"This agrees with what another student has recorded as having been said by Mrs. Eddy, namely, "When I wanted to dispel a storm.  I did not say, 'there is no thunder, and no lightning.' But I said, 'God's face is here, and I do see it.'"

Through the lens of shifting memory-clouds, we can let the flash of anger pale, the thunder of pride die away, and the clouds--that would hide the face of God in one another--fleck and dissolve.  And in this light, we find ourselves, and others, innocent, beautiful, pure, and free.

"Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
and feathered canyons everywhere..."
- Joni Mitchell

Ahhh, Joni you were not just the poet laureate of our time, but a gentle shepherd, a friend who took my hand on a very special journey through the poetry of your song.

with Love,

Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

[photo credit: Forrest Wilder 2009]