Look up

Watching clouds appear, disappear, and reform has been a pastime of mine my entire life. As a child, my mother would peer through the kitchen window and yell that I should stop daydreaming, and "do something." I remember laying there thinking that must be what a dog feels like. They understand the intention but not the words. Her intention was serious, but I did not understand what she meant – "do something." Annoyed at being interrupted at my sky gazing, I’d skirt the side of the house, out of her window range, and find a shady new spot to lie down.

It’s been forty years, and I continue to have my head in the clouds. The Weather Channel is now my channel of choice. Watching the moving path of nationwide precipitation still thrills. The Doppler shows a far reaching pressure system, which will create, dissolve, and build all of my personal favorites – cumulus, cirrus, and lenticular.

I imagine children looking to the sky; lying in the cornfields of Kansas, horseback riding across the plains, or maybe looking up from sunny parks in New York City. It makes me happy to know that they see them too. We’re like a club where we know other members are out there, we just don’t know who they are. Today I’m hoping that God will take a long deep breath and blow some new clouds my way. Wherever I am, I promise to look up.