Cloud gazer

Some people never surprise themselves, or their friends by doing something new. Not that they have an aversion toward doing anything new, but simply because they are not mentally capable of entertaining new ideas. Those are the people who say that the mysteries that lie behind the curtained clouds are nothing but illusions. However, those of us who have endeavored to solve these mysteries know better, for we have no fear to be startled, and we know that what those curtains hide, guides us to the things we seek.

One of my favorite pastimes as a child, and my fondest memories, was sitting on the roof of the porch next to my grandfather and gazing at the clouds. I often fondly think of those moments as I lose myself in the clouds and drift along in all their beautiful scenes. I could never get enough of my grandfather's soothing presence and the warmth of his stories.

 May was his favorite month of the year.

- “The month of May holds treasures,” he would say. “The air is so rich and pure after winter has shrouded the sky in gloomy robes in mourning for summer. 

As the first white cloud arrives, the lark begins to sing its song, the air seems to melt with tender heath and takes on the softest, richest shade of blue. Nothing but blue as far as the eye can see. Soft, rich, warm, tender, melting enchanting blue. Like the blue of a translucent sapphire without a flaw to disturb the surface. As clear as a crystal lake. A great arc of tenderness a procession of white-spotted clouds, sailing majestically from one harbor of mystery to another. Among the richest treasures of the month of May, the hanging curtains of snow-white clouds are to be mentioned. The horizon of life is always draped with rich folds of blue and white, hanging like silk curtains, hiding with seductive mystery the secrets that lie beyond.

Day after day the curtains hide their abstruseness in treasure chests, tempting us to pitch tents and travel there, with the eagerness of little children unwrapping their Christmas presents. We watch the movements of clouds, trusting that each new shifting of the curtains will reveal a much sought-after revelation." Then he paused and sighed wistfully:

-"As we travel further and further, the revelations remain elusive..."

There had been a time when he could not see the clouds. When the world turned dark, he was starving and converted into saleable property. After the incredible fairy-tale of white supremacy had taken over. He became a blithe trespass on hyphenated ground, bodying forth the contending forces that broke him. His displacement resulted in the erasure of an unrequited search for the key characteristics of the human spirit. Not being able to see an open sky may not seem like a great loss, but the lack of clouds is a hardship and a greater loss than the world realizes. Terrestrial landscapes mean a lot, but not everything—people go looking for them, chasing these celestial landscapes going around the world. These nations are free of ties… The tourist's terrestrial landscape is nothing compared to the shadows of a cloud. A cloud controls the light that makes the mountains of the earth appear or fade according to its passage. They wear, from head to toe, the luminous gray, or the emphatic purple, whichever the cloud allows, so simply. Local colors and seasons cease, are lost or are obliterated by the disposition of a cloud. The seas and oceans have no mood other than that of the air and its winds. It is the cloud, holding the sun's rays in a bundle like a giant holds a handful of spears and touches the horizon, touching the very edge with a delicate manifestation of light, suddenly extinguishing it, or making the foreground appear. Who doesn`t know the manifest work of a cloud, when it descends and participates so clearly in the landscape, lies halfway up the side of a mountain, bends down to rain heavily on a lake, or obscures part of the view in the rudest of ways?

But the greatest things are done from its proper place, up from where it is divided by the sun. From there it shrouds more mysteries among the hills and valley than any poet can hide. There it renews the pencils of the sun, and it casts concealing colors upon forest lands.

Its beauty remains unchanged when there is no earth to improve upon. It floats above the street, and the suburbs, above the factories and the stucco, the painted white houses, on surfaces subjected as the only things that can vulgarize the light, as they catch and reflect it, grotesque in their evocative brilliance.

But nowhere is the cloud so victorious as when it towers over a small landscape of rather meager interest, a conventional river full of water, gardens with their small evergreens, groves, and shrubs, and thick trees that have become impervious to the light. 

High above these towers; in the vast scale of the landscape of clouds, a heroic sky, such as no one would ever dare to expect. None of the things ever made on Earth are big enough to support such a sky. An epic vault of heaven, where your eyes can gaze over a thousand miles of clouds. What are the distances from Earth to Heaven? The horizon seems so close, but the sky is immeasurable.

In the sky of clouds, the view continues. There, beyond the reach of limitations, the cloud composes its majestic symphony.

The clouds control the sun, not only by watching its rays, but by becoming the counselor of its mood, obscuring the sun when it is angry, or sending an angry ray flying against an iron-grey storm in the background. Or reveal the anger when it is used to threaten. A cloud lifts the sun to become gentle hope, making peace, just before sunset.

On days where a south-westerly wind blows, a celestial game takes place, trusting the wind to carry the colors of the clouds, when in the evenings they are enveloped by a breeze from behind and they seem to jump from the horizon for hours in the merry air.

Did you know that all clouds carry rainbows? For each cloud, there is a scarf of red, orange, yellow, red, scarlet, and purple. Earth's rainbows can never be complete, man can only see half a rainbow because he has only one worldview.

Some people never surprise themselves, or their friends by doing something new. Not that they have an aversion toward doing anything new, but simply because they are not mentally capable of entertaining new ideas. Those are the people who say that the mysteries that lie behind the curtained clouds are nothing but illusions. However, those of us who have endeavored to solve these mysteries know better, for we have no fear to be startled, and we know that what those curtains hide, guides us to the things we seek.

One of the last things, my grandfather said to me was:

-“Child, whatever you do, wherever you go, never give u looking at the clouds. There is nothing that widens one´s life as studying

 the sky. It is well, to look upwards and learn a lesson of patience.”