My mother was an artist. The clouds were a tool she used to bring an artistic vision to my life. My earliest childhood memories include watching the clouds and making up stories about what I saw in them. The composition in the clouds becomes a kaleidoscope of childhood imagination. Life in visual essentials – light, dark, balance, tone, and movement.
These outings with nature taught me lessons about life and viewpoint on what we can control and what we can not. For example, we can all take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism. We learn worry is only an imagination that nature knows nothing about.
We learn anger dissipates as the clouds and gratitude congregate in the openness of the blue sky. An understanding of it is only understood by the things of nature void of complications of failure and fear. A lesson in the clarity of simplicity and faith. Our life is independent of total understanding and sometimes torn mid-air between what is real and what is dreamed; what is predetermined and what is a choice.
As I grew, I continued to explore the sometimes taciturn, sometimes talkative expression in the sky. As my mother did, I took to making art and my paintings are derived from the fascination and inspiration of viewing the natural process of constant change.
In morning hours we rise with intentions and yet the ever-changing movement of the day charts its course, and every story becomes full of vivid color, exuding light and dark, shape and texture, becoming an abstraction of the joys and the complications we live with, every day.
Our day becomes a twenty-four-hour gift of the opportunity given for us to decide what we will do with it. We are individually responsible for the quality of those 1440 minutes. It's a choice. We can look for the good in the day, or only see the difficulties in it. We can close our eyes, our minds, and our hearts... or we can look for the silver linings in the clouds. And find them.