Blue Skies, by Gillian

Blue skies smiling at me; nothing but blue skies do I see.

Well for God's sake, how boring is that? Sure, we welcome blue skies because they signal a clear sunny day ahead. We use them metaphorically in the same way. But the fact is that clear blue skies are not interesting. They do not fascinate us the way cloudy skies do. We don't have different names for different parts of a blue sky, the way we talk of cirrus and cumulonimbus clouds.

I belong .... wait for it, you're going to love this .... to The Cloud Appreciation Society. Weird cloud photographers from all around the world post cloud photos and videos to the website, and so many of them are breathtakingly beautiful. I myself have, in my computer, something over 500 photos of nothing but clouds, or those taken primarily because of the cloud formations they capture. In only one of the whole collection is there a clear blue sky.

A while ago, I put together a small booklet of my own sky photos, accompanied by appropriate quotations, because the sky, to me, is too beautiful not to be accompanied by poetic appreciation. As the Cloud Appreciation Society says it -

' ... (clouds) are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.'

And, I would add, you don't have to risk life and limb to watch them, unlike so many of nature's more dramatic displays.

The same website also reminds us, in its somewhat tongue-in-cheek 'manifesto', that we should fight what it calls 'blue-sky thinking' wherever we find it. Life, they say, would indeed be dull if we had to look up at a cloudless monotony day after day. It is, of course, a whole lot easier to espouse that philosophy living in a place like Colorado than in the many cities in this country which receive over 60" of rain per year, and have little opportunity to grow bored with clear blue skies.

And there are endless quotes exhorting us to appreciate those metaphorical clouds in our lives, in order that we might fully appreciate the blue skies when they return. Quite honestly, I'm not totally convinced. I suspect this may be a tactical encouragement towards positive thinking of, and response to, the inevitable. Did I really need to break my wrist in order to appreciate my fully-functioning joints? Must I suffer from that miserable Xmas cold to value my usual good health? I don't think so. But I couldn't help myself; I had to see what that WWW had to offer.

There are, need I say, many comments on the topic. Two I really liked.

The first said,

'One can appreciate the Good in Life without experiencing the Bad

However, when one experiences the Bad

That which was not quite so Good becomes Good

and the Good we experience radiates a stronger energy than before...'

The other said,

'.... experiencing bad would definitely allow you to appreciate the good more then you previously have. But if you were raised with the right values to already do all that then you wouldn't necessarily need the bad in your life.'

Points to ponder.

But I return to that 'manifesto' of the Cloud Society, which ends with the final, simpler, injunction,

'.... always remember to live life with your head in the clouds!'

© June 2016

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.