Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Clouds...

The clouds over our part of the word, that is, central Sweden, over here by the Baltic coast, have been just amazingly beautiful these past weeks!...I have always been struck by the immense hugeness of the sky in this land...I at first thought it was just due to the lower, more even landscape, compared to the jagged Alpine horizons I was used to, and that is part of it...Patrick tells me it's also because the earth is actually not perfectly spherical, a bowling ball shape, but instead sort of flattened near the poles, so that the curve of the horizon up here in 55-60 latitudes starts to be flatter, thus så där voilà! bigger sky!...We're living on a beautiful blue, er, tomato, or perhaps, onion!...

Back to the clouds...lately they have been giant white-blue-grey cumulonimbus, massing into thunderheads and producing storm fronts...I love lightning and thunderstorms, comes from growing up in the bottom end of Tornado Alley USA...My reflex is to run OUTdoors when it hits!...And those marching cumulus ranks across the big, wide Nordic blue sky...Sunsets are 360-degree celestial Omnimax, something in all directions...The best are those late-in-the-day cumulonimbus-thunderhead towers off on the horizon, absolutely colossal in scale, over the little tiny cars and trucks on the thin ribbon of Highway 276, the toy blue Roslags train, the little red Lego houses...

I once checked out a book of black-and-white photographs of clouds and skies over France... The point was to show the timeless nature of the cloud formations over the towns and villages whose lives went on year in, year out...It was powerful...I often look up and see timeless skies with cirrus, nimbus, and stratus, always up there over us, while we are born, and live, and move on, while countries make war, while people become free and are fed, while cars go from big to boxy to roundy-smooth to New Edge-angular, while we fall in love, learn to play piano, and move our lives all over the earth, animals disappear, people work for justice...

Up above the clouds, up among the cumulonimbus towers, in the open, clear sky, above the storm front, with only the sun and this Boeing 767, it is a bigger reality...Both sides now, she sang?...

Something about eternity, some kind of ecstacy got a hold on me, Bruce Cockburn's early song comes back...Lots of big thoughts from watching these late-summer clouds over Stockholm...I think of how significant and precious we are, every one of us, here on this marbled blue onion, to God, the One who is not just above all but here with us, has come to visit us...These beautiful clouds remind me of God's eternity, of His power, and that He goes on and on...Then I return to my train-and-bus trip, my work here "below", my family, my neighbor, my city, and I know it is all significant, it is a gift...And I thank my parents for teaching me the names of the clouds... Posted by Picasa

1 Comments:

Blogger Clairikine said...

Me at age five or six: "What's Daddy doing?"

Dad (on balcony): "MWAHAHAHAHAAA! AAHHHH!!!"

Love youse :-)

11:28 AM  

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