I have thought a lot about deleting Facebook, especially with some of the “recommended reels” which are absolutely horrible because so many are about starving animals or hurting animals or AI’d whales having their barnacles brushed off.

Facebook is not a place I devote a lot of my time too. But when I scroll, I need that lift from life. Let’s get away from cantankerous people and divisive politics and antagonistic societies. I’m not an escapist. I know that there is a lot happening around the world. I read headlines and articles daily so I can be literate and knowledgeable. But social media is…well…social. Tell me about your poetry. Your books. Your pinch pots. Show me your puppies and send me your prayer requests.

But I do not want to see active pain being inflicted on innocent animals.

So. I said all that to say this:

I joined the “Cloud Appreciation Society.” Photographs and analysis of clouds. Yeah. Clouds. Not mushroom nuclear clouds. Not F5 tornadoes or category 5 hurricanes.

Feather clouds.

Stirated clouds.

Clouds that have really cool scientific names that I can’t remember because I’m exhausted and I’m still new to the society.

I thought it was just going to be pictures of clouds that are reminiscent of the Up couple who lie on the hill and point to clouds and dream about their futures.

Much like my childhood. When I laid on the grass or leaned my head against the car’s windowpane or stood in my bedroom and stared at the clouds. I loved watching them morph as winds scuttled through or shifted the cloudy landscape.

I loved the low hanging clouds on a rainy day. The way they lumped into soggy upside down dunes and poured out the water, like when I twist wet towels to leach out the water.

Or the cute fluffy white clouds that populate the backgounds of happy movies and children’s cartoons. Those clouds are story tellers, the way they undulate and shift. From them, I remember seeing a unicorn standing on the cloud’s edge, staring down at the world. Or dragons leaping from the plumed smoke gurlging from their fires. Or the perfectly smooth UFO cloud on the day I had my first successful teaching interview.

I love the steep black clouds that creep over the mountains or skulk over the horizons in advent of a thunderstorm.

Or the wispy foglets that are tendrils drifting up through pine trees.

I watch clouds because they are beautiful and ever-shifting. I watch them to see when they part and the gorgeous glimpse of the blue sky above..that quick pulse of hope. I love watching clouds when the sun is low and beams glaze through and strike the earth in long, dusty strips of light. I used to think that this was God taking souls to Heaven.

Sometimes, I still like to think that.

I’m 53. And I still stop to watch the clouds. Even though when I’m walking my dogs they do not have the same appreciation because they can’t sniff the clouds for other dogs’ social media messages (channeling my inner Billy Collins poet person(??)). Or when I’m walking along Main Street and I’m supposed to look adult and important or professional or business or something smart and certainly not a pudgy woman who will stop and gape at an impressive ball of fluff in the sky.

Yeah. I’m also that person who, when I’m in Big Meadows, will chase milkweed seed pods.

And monarch butterflies.

I watch the clouds because, for a moment, the world is wispy nothing. I am immersed within the Disney Fantasia sunrises and sunsets. I am suspended within this watercolor world where wishes are real and goodness is paramount and unkindness will be held accountable with justice. I watch clouds because they hold no malice. Even if they are destructive storm bearers, they are not pouring out their rain or wind or lightning with the intent to create pain. They are living out their purpose.

I watch clouds so that I can remember that beauty and hope and joy exist all around me. Even on my hardest days when those emotions and attributes are most distant, I can still find the clouds.