July 14, 5:04 AM
The day before was a tired day, a day that she woke up early, as usual, and then went back to sleep an hour later, her body dully aching with the need for more sleep. She didn’t feel badly about going back to bed, though there was a dim little pulse of awareness that her sleeping would be seen as ‘lazy,’ ever-so-slightly deserving of judgement. That her sleeping, though nobody knew she was going back to sleep, would be perceived as indulgent or spoiled in some way.
This was her socialization muttering to her when she woke up very early and worked for only an hour before falling back into the comfort of much needed sleep.
Yesterday, she felt uncertain about the validity – the worth – of her work again, though the doubt did not run too deep.
She had found, or – rather – had patiently created, a loop hole for herself over the years.
As she entered the 12th year of her note-taking, she could find refuge from any accusation of worthlessness in the sheer mass of it all.
Surely, anything that she had worked on so diligently for so long must be worth something, valid unto itself through sheer persistence if nothing else.
After a project has existed for long enough, it is no longer only a matter of its specific content being worthwhile, the fact of its being something that she had worked at – regardless of content – for over a decade became a worth in and of itself.
The validity of her commitment – whether misguided or not – held a worth of its own.
It mattered to her, if nothing else. Gave her something to be curious about, to be amazed by, a conundrum of experience and reality that has been wholly her own for a long, long time.
This work has very little to do with how I feel about it – the work. What it means to me, my relationship with it – these things don’t matter.
At this particular juncture in time, none of that – my neurotic navel-gazing and self-scrutiny about worth and validity – means anything in light of the fact that she feels directed to simply share it, compelled to share the work, as much for her own delight in potentially figuring out why the clouds look weird, and – more importantly – in that sharing this work might inspire people to see, connect with, and appreciation aspects of being briefly alive in the context of an ancient living and dying world that is unfolding in an infinite number of dynamic ways every fraction of every second, and over the millenia.
She doesn’t have to understand it. She doesn’t have to explain it. She doesn’t need to provide any further justification for her questions. She just has to show people why she has questions. Then maybe they will help her to answer those questions.
There is no possible way that this is going to be so simple as that.
She knows this.
She needs to make a note about the experience of going back through old posts in the effort to find the post about the clouds never looking the same, as that would be a satisfying media-stitch connecting this time to that time through archival artifacts that are pertinent to the story I am trying to tell in the present, the questions I am now asking about the questions I was asking then.
Speaking of questions: What can the shapes and forms in other configurations of natural phenomena in structures of aggregation and disaggregation, dissolution or fracturing, wearing, settling, and layering say about how there are triangle shapes, etc. in the sky?
Note that the unsupported section of concrete bank along this urban drainage creek has collapsed in the vague form of a triangle.
What processes and perspectives can help me to neutrally and humbly explore the range of my apophenic and pareidolic capacities, which – by my casual estimation – are pretty astounding…and overwhelming, especially when linked with/informed by a belief (or emotional/cognitive investment and satisfaction in experiences reinforcing of an idea) that recognizable shapes and figures in the sky may represent an ancient universal force engaging in an act of communications delivered by exceedingly patient angels, or – also, interesting – that phenomena in atmospheric metaphysics manifest in cloudforms that mirror characteristics and attributes of other living things, the appearance of which may create an experience of recognition and relevance in human observers, a vestigial genetically-derived association of certain forms with meanings of general importance, an innately human seeing of the world as powerful, wise, and alive, a trait inherited from our ancient shared ancestry, humans who spent a lot of time looking at the sky and creating stories and culture around – in part – what they saw above them, their perception informed by the lives they lived on the ground in the cultures they were born into?
Is there a configuration of specific conditions for clouds to assume the metapatterns and micropatterns of many living things and human creations of what seem to be symbols, symbols that may reflect these patterns in a sort of reflexive echoing of form and meaning across time?
Are there ancient omnipresent metaphysical forces that have been known as God or gods for thousands of years of human history?
The debate in her head volleys reason and perceived evidence.
She considers the picture of the cloudform she saw the other night as the sun was going down. The one that looked very much like a book.
“Well, then,” she asks her skepticism, “what do you have to say about this?”
The volume is bursting with white-gold light, a hazy form like a candelabra rising from between the covers, textures like coral pressed into and rising from the bright trapezoidal form.
The part of her that wants to believe, that secretly does believe, entirely and with the whole of her heart, that she is witnessing some kind of display of holy wonders is can be extremely charismatic in perceiving possible miracles.
“This, as you can see, is not a naturally occurring form. It is a book, which is a device of humans. What about that then?”
She tucks her belief away and braces herself for the internal dismissal of the notion that she’d seen ‘a book’ as her skeptical mind, which is as much for protection as it is for any inherent value of rationality, begins to list all the cracks and lattices that can be easily observed in all manner of material. Stone and clay, lead paint – the natural process of material pulling away from itself, tightening and shrinking, making lines like the shape she saw as a book.
I see a lot because I look a lot. A lot.
I would not exactly say that I am ‘looking for,’ though I have ‘looked for’ before. I spent a fair amount of time in the Summer and Fall of 2010 staring at the sky in urgent prayer. “Please, show them, show them, show them. Show them what I see, make them see. Show them. Please show them.” I thought I had begged before – for permission from authorities, for kindness, for desired objects as a child – but, I had never begged something like God, even when I was deeply suffering and I longed for something to end my pain. I had never begged like a prayer for the world.
I look at the sky as soon as I go outside and if something seems to be interesting I pay attention. There is usually something interesting happening and the longer I pay attention, the more interesting it gets. What may have initially seemed like hints of an eye or a bird’s beak become – quite quickly – vast and slow-swirling assemblages that hold angles and patterns and near-perfect portraits, near-perfect lines.
I am compelled to continue to watch, against distraction and will, both of which fizzle to nothing in the state of total reverie I experience when I watch the clouds, which is as much about science as it is about God, as much about beauty as it is about anything and, perhaps, the miracle of everything.
Sometimes, she doesn’t want to look up, because she knows she will have to keep watching and although she loves the experience of close attention, sustained focus, awe and surprise, she has begun to notice an anxiety. The knowing she needs to tell someone, talk to someone about all this is persistent, nagging.
Take the dog on a walk to look at the clouds. It isn’t about taking the dog for a walk, it’s about looking to see what the clouds might be doing and momentarily inhabiting the reality in which the clouds could and would be doing anything at all other than simply being a cloud.
She doesn’t like the pressure of it. The pressure that is in her head, saying do this, don’t do that, but that also lives somewhere deeper in her, pushing out in a tingling, persistent thrum that feels like calling.
Prove God with clouds, but don’t sound too crazy. Keep it a secret, but keep doing it. Don’t keep it a secret. Tell people. Figure out how to tell people. But, first watch this freaky cloud. Yo. Hang on, almost done. You’re hungry? What if the sky displayed something impossible or really important and you miss it because you are being a slovenly human eating pasta in your bed and trying not to think about the sky, but staring at the same picture, taken 6 times, trying to find the instance when the details of the bird’s beak in the sky were especially precise?
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