Cloud People

They are up there, so far removed, following the ways of wind and mist. Billow and wisp, streak and waffle, puff and thunderhead slide across each other on different planes, above and below but also existing all at once, together and separate within the endless blue.

It is a blue that’s been often painted, and described, and sung by lofty voices but that cannot be replicated so easily in tint, or word, or note. These clumsy attempts only dance around the pureness of azure truth without ever actually coming to it, this blue that is an amalgamation of all blues, ever. It is only seen by terrestrial eyes because of the ancient, distant light shot through the equally ancient prisms, prisms that have poured into and nourished so many billions of earthly bodies, all the bodies, since forever. Now, though, and only for now, the prisms conjoin and cavort in the currents flowing overhead.

To the watcher far below, the sky people seem so close, close as family, benevolent as wisdom holders, their knowledge given only to one willing to be quiet, to watch and see the stories unfolding. With suspended heartbeat, she witnesses the slow turning of a cottony head, the closing of indistinct eyelids, the wind-driven smile as it fades slowly, disappearing into that infinite blue. Their answers are delivered in epic charade, left up to interpretation, received whenever they can be within small, private, momentary context.

And, on the ground, the watcher is laid out on the earth, seeking a mother’s healing, solace that was promised in a mountain whisper. Her repose is surrounded by tall grasses gone brown in the cooling of the season. The long golden shafts waver over her, weeds to some, left, during the greening, to grow because the residents couldn’t bear to tame the abundance. Now, the dry rustling becomes part of her alchemy, the passing of each plant not a singular death, but only the cycling of a community, its true life moving underground, unseen but all the more enduringly real because of its networked variety of root and grub, of ant and mineral and seed.

It is the essence of decaying, regenerating generosity that forms a tender hammock, the watcher staring upward, supported, joining the ground dwellers, those who rest upon the earth but extend their presence into the sky, those who stitch together all elements into one. She is a part, tiny but as essential as the beetle or the deer. She is the one who possesses and contributes her urgent need to sink down, to become the dirt, to feed and be fed by the darker creatures, to be interred for a time and relieved of the pressures of the living.

But, even as roots wend their way through bone and skin and flesh, the watcher’s wide, clear eyes find the elders in the clouds. She breathes in the sky that lies nearest this living-dying surface, the air that is, in fact, created by the organic growing there, and her perspective suddenly shifts, not resting in an envelope of oxygen at all but inside one of water. She feels the breeze as a brush of liquid, sand shifting over her rather than the tickle of plant leaves and she wonders about being a citizen of the deep, looking up, marveling at the gargantuan beings who skid across the surface of an atmospheric ocean.

But then they are air again and water too, of course, but water spun into downy elders, their kindness also a promise, another version of healing, only the barest touch for now, during the hibernation, her pupation, but a promise just the same.

In time, she will once again stand upright and stride across the globe, not whole exactly, not as she was when she was new, but changed, another creature entirely, something else. She is coming into her final phase but in that last moment of years, she will unfurl her beauty and her steel to lift herself into the wind, to become something she’s never been able to be, to catch the golden sunlight in her colors, to touch and join the people in the clouds.