I often have flashes of inspiration when I’m in a car. Maybe it’s just because I don’t ride in cars very often and that makes it a little bit of a liminal space for me, associated with holidays and family events. This idea came to me from a truly spectacular cloudscape I saw today. I hope you enjoy it.
The Place in the Clouds
I’ll never forget the first time that I saw the Place in the Clouds.
It was any old Tuesday in July, in the car on the way to some Aunt. I stared out the backseat window as the music wound and twisted between old rock and folksy pop. The rapeseed fields stretched on both sides of the highway, waving like an endless sea of golden yellow hands up at the sky. And the clouds… They were a weave of complex shapes and sizes, layers and layers of variation, deeper than what seemed possible. It was as though they stretched out across the whole universe, right there in our troposphere. Archways and towers and forests and paths, and things leaving behind wispy trails. One side eternally sun-kissed, the other perpetually under the gentle caress of shadow.
Powerful, every-changing. Fleeting enough for a wind to take, steadfast enough for eons not to touch.As the clouds shifted, all that depth flattening into a single, greyish rain-soaked disc overhead, I swore to myself, quietly under the sound of the music and the engine and filled with a surety never before felt in my young body, that one day, somehow, I would go there.