a poet's guide to cloud spotting
{2} interwoven: for spotters of shapes and faces floating in the sky
Lovely human, this is the second of our interwoven adventures. I am so glad that you are here. Today, we are speaking of the clouds.
time telling
Birch leaves turning purple-red || Kaka (a New Zealand mountain parrot) returning to the house; Dew heavy in the mornings
noticings
Ground both damp and crispy underfoot. Neatly organised piles of too-thin-to-be-logs, too-thick-to-be-sticks arranged like runes around the paddock. Honey-Dew Melon coloured lichen hanging from branches high up in the tree, tall enough to see out to sea. Moss, of three different types that I’m not knowledgeable enough to name. A chainsaw, a distant barking dog. Cows clustered round the gate on the paddock on the hill. The sound of Korimako || Bellbird, absent from sight. The inside of an old log cracked open like a burst chocolate eclair.
introduction
This is a week dedicated to clouds. You could ask why, at this precise moment in time, when our news feeds, lives, are full of things more commanding, demanding of attention, that cloud spotting could be seen to be important? But the aimlessness of the pursuit, if you consider it to be that, is in and of itself the leading point.
The sky, the clouds, are to me, cheerleaders of the mystical within the experience of everyday normal. By simply looking up, we are invited to a live-stream of never-to-be-seen-again now-ness, fleetingly captured by water crystals in the sky.
To Thoreau, understanding clouds was, as he wrote, something that ‘stirs my blood and makes my thoughts flow. What sort of science is that which enriches understanding but robs the imagination?’
Just as the ground beneath our feet supports us, the sky is part of a witnessing, ever present, relational landscape that flows through us and around. The understanding, watching of the clouds, not only brings us more in tune with the weather, the swirling patterns that inform the activities of our living, but is a reminder of wonder whose everyday-ness is the exact reason it may escape our wandering attention.
As I read recently, and I paraphrase for you now: a person too dull to look up at the sky and see a penguin lassoing a blue whale, or a unicorn attached to a balloon is not a person worth lying in a meadow with.
So this week, I dedicate our cloud watching selves to exactly that pursuit:
to being a person interesting enough to lie next to in a meadow.
And so our cloud spotting begins.
small stories
cumulus; ‘heaped, piled, puffy’
You’re moving swiftly, over the surface of the earth. You are flying. Not high. One or two inches up, hands hovering above. Eyes, body, all stretched out, facing towards ground. You’re reaching, as though performing a silent healing, but this is no ceremony as such. You’re feeling for the temperature. A noticing, in fact, of the spaces that feel warmer, or comparatively, quite cool.
Your hands, alongside of your noticing, become attuned to subtle difference. Notice each place, each space, that feels different to the touch, where the air rises differently to meet them.
Like this place over here, where all the leaves have fallen. The once living vegetation resting in layers on the ground cause the air above to feel just slightly warm.
This ploughed field feels the same. This patch over here as you travel up the mountain, and then- not. It cools right off again as you fly over to the right. Heats up once more as you make your way back down.
There are spaces, wider landscapes, that feel cooler. Some that make your bones ache, like you’ve plunged into an icy, open sea. And even amongst smaller spaces, those that visually register little change, you begin to observe the temperature variation. It’s a fascination, you think, that so much could be different moving over only inches square of space.
In your flying, you realize all at once, you can flip over. You do so, find now that you are staring at the sky. Your eyes become attuned to something different, a magic show that’s just begun. Air rising in columns, an earth and sky created colosseum, rising up from warm pockets on the ground.
An uprising, uproaring, upcycling of heat that in the fastness of its moving, holds the moisture of its contents within a vapour state. The warm air continues to move up, and meets its cooler friend; now the true, mysterious work of cloud forming has begun.
Within the cooling pockets of air, the water is revealed. Invisibility begins to take its form. And along with this warm air, spiralling up in columns, to meet its cooler counterparts, we find ourselves in blue-tinged maternal space, the place in which a cumulus cloud is born.
Cumulus or,
handfuls of suspended puffballs; story time clouds; cotton balls; clouds for lovers and for dreamers; for spotters of shapes and faces floating in the sky.
Cumulus are the clouds you give if you were to hold out both your palms and offer someone the present of a cloud.
Cumulus;
created from invisible columns of air that rise off sun warmed ground to meet the descending cold air falling from above.
Stratus; from Strato meaning ‘layer’
In the morning, you awake, pull open the curtains. You’re dismayed to see a haze of grey covering the light. But this is not what you think, despite the disappointed feeling. This is not a dour blanket attempting to continue on the night.
The stratus cloud, or fog, is the sky becoming curious. A gentle reaching out and a kissing of the ground. A call to hush felt only with the body. A dragon’s breath sent spiralling over land.
The limited visibility of the stratus, or the misty fog, perhaps, is a call to something deeper. If in fog, we feel doomed, restricted to a simple, aimless wander, then perhaps this is the point. These silvery, skin-felt tendrils of a cloud reduce our visibility to what’s only half a step beyond us. A removal of distraction, a call to what’s immediate, to that which lies just within our current sight, so that we might take the time to see beyond it.
A stratus cloud, or fog,
a love affair with ground, a kissing of the earth, an invisibility cloak that allows for disappearing out of sight. A space for reinvention, a cloud in tip toe form, an invitation from the clouds to come to rest.
Stratus;
moist air chilling over cool land.
cirrus; taken from the latin, cirro for curl of hair
Our experience of cirrus is all a matter of perspective. Our looking up from down below gives the illusion of a calm, ethereal sky. But what we’re really seeing is an atmospheric ocean, clouds sculpting themselves against the unseen structure of the air.
Atmospheric surging, swirling of waves all playing, diving, cavorting in the upper reaches of the troposphere, an explosive, graceful arrangement of ice crystals leaving a kaleidoscope of patterns for the earthly ones below.
Cirrus are the gymnasts, the catch-me-if-you-can clouds, the contemporary dancers, shape shifters, the catchers of the dusks and the wonder makers of reds and pinks and orange at the coming of the dawn.
A cirrus cloud or,
high altitude clouds, thin and wispy streaks made of ice crystals.