Clouds

Sometimes I feel like a ping-pong ball, whacked back and forth from coast to coast by malevolent forces beyond my control.

Whack!   East Coast…100 obligations, events, and expectations…

Whack!   West Coast…hold on to your hat and hit the ground running!

Usually, I find myself somewhere over Texas.

Looking out the window, I stare at the puffy, white clouds. I imagine jumping on them…collapsing into them…resting in them. I wonder what they taste like. Soft snow? Celestial cotton candy?

Watching them makes me feel soft and malleable, like they are.

Slowly, imperceptibly, they shift and evolve into new shapes and forms.

As do I.

The tense and tension-laden me shifts and softens into the calm and peaceful me.

It helps to have a little perspective.

It’s all in the way you look at things. And the angle from which you view them.

There is a river of peace that gently flows above the frenzied anthill of the earth below.

I hope I can float it in after I land.

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Rows and floes of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons ev'rywhere

I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun

They rain and snow on ev'ryone

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way


I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's clouds illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all.

Joni Mitchell