Send in the Clouds

I am sitting – loafing (an interesting word) beneath a brilliant blue October sky in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I happen to look up and find that I can’t look away. I begin watching clouds drifting from right to left. The clouds on their way to wherever clouds go at night. Go at night?

My son, age five, was looking up at a cloud filled sky one day. I asked him what he was thinking about. After reassuring him that I wouldn’t make fun of his thoughts, he told me that he was wondering where the clouds go at night. “Is there like a cloud corral or something?” I thought that was a precious, innocent question, I still do.

Seems that on this crisp fall day, I have an unplanned appointment with a professor, Dr. Sky.

The lesson begins when the thought comes to me that clouds can be a lot like relationships. (I can’t help it. Give me two seconds to look at almost anything, and it will turn into a metaphor.) The thoughts now coming faster than I can write them down.

Some clouds are wisps, barely there, carrying the possibility of becoming something more. Others arrive fully formed, substantial, confident along their edges. Still others roil and boil, gathering, stretching, collapsing, reshaping themselves. Flat one moment, puffy the next, as if being inflated by an invisible air pump. Some join together, becoming something that neither could have become alone. Others separate and drift off in different directions.

Rather like us beings, human and otherwise. Some clouds and people become recognizable to me, shaped like a face, an animal, a ship. Each type of inkblot test, inviting me to see things. To speculate. Others show possibility but rush off before they become fully formed.  

That’s what happens in relationships. I see something in another person; they see something in me. Somewhere between who I am, and who I imagine the other person to be, who they are and who they imagine me to be, a relationship forms, takes shape, or doesn’t.

Sometimes we see each other clearly. Sometimes I see what I hope to see, or what I fear. And sometimes, if I stay curious, I discover someone quite different from the person I first knew. And that includes me.

I wonder if little clouds long to become part of something bigger. Do they look toward their enormous neighbors and wish to join them? Or are they content to remain small, separate, briefly, and gloriously themselves?

I wonder the same about us humans. Some of us seem to need enormous families of relationships, great gatherings of human clouds offering belonging, protection, and reassurance. Others prefer traveling alone, or with one or two companions. Some relationships provide shelter. Others cast shadows. Some bring refreshing rain. Others arrive with thunder and lightning, leaving us wondering what on earth just happened. Some simply evaporate. Not necessarily because anything went wrong. But the conditions that brought us together changed.

Now a cloud passes overhead with the tail of a scorpion. Another disappears into the mouth of a buffalo munching across an imaginary prairie. A third forms itself around an empty center, a gigantic white Life Saver floating in blue.

Then comes a caravan of misfits: ragged, fragile, crowded close together, like survivors in some Mad Max movie crossing the desert after the end of the world. Ill-formed. Asymmetric. None particularly impressive. Looking as if the slightest of winds would be capable of pulling them apart. And yet, there they are. Together.

I find myself especially fond of these clouds, perhaps because they remind me of the unlikely communities of people I know and am a part of. Each of us carrying wounds, peculiarities, unfinished business, private sorrows, and strange little habits. People who might never have chosen one another under different circumstances, yet somehow, we find ourselves traveling together. Perfectly imperfect. Not even particularly well formed. But together, that’s enough. That’s quite a lot, actually.

I watch clouds merge and wonder what becomes of their individual identities. Where does one end and the other begin? Is something lost in the joining? Something gained? Can they separate again without becoming less than they were?

Questions worth asking about marriage, friendship, family, community; about intimacy itself.

How close can we become without disappearing into one another? How separate can we remain without losing connection? How do we allow someone we love to change shape without insisting they remain the person we first recognized?

I have known relationships that arrived like magnificent thunderheads, impossible to ignore, filling the horizon with promise. Some brought nourishing rain. Others left destruction. I’ve known quiet, unremarkable connections that have remained a visible part of me for decades, and spectacular ones that disappeared before I could learn their middle names. 

I don’t know where all those relationships began, or where they went. Some are still drifting somewhere beyond my horizon. Others have become part of the atmosphere of my life—no longer visible, but somehow still present. If I look closely, their footprints are in the dewy grass.

Now the Starship Enterprise sails into view, a huge, magnificent mothership apparently headed for a docking station at Black Elk Peak. (I love making stuff up, and sometimes that gets me into a lot of trouble in my relationships too.)

And then, the grand finale. A gigantic turtle lumbering slowly across the heavens. Ancient. Unhurried. Carrying something enormous on its back. It stops. Looks down at me. I look back.

Two creatures who have somehow found one another on an October afternoon. One made totally of water. The other, me, as it turns out, also made mostly of water. Both of us just passing through.

Which brings me to the sheer improbability of all this. Billions of years of cosmic happenings, countless accidents, beginnings, endings, migrations, decisions, and chance encounters had to occur for this particular turtle and this particular old man to meet beneath this particular sky.

The same is true of every person I’ve ever loved: every friend, every teacher, every stranger whose kindness interrupted an ordinary day. I can’t even imagine everything that had to happen for any two of us to find one another, and how easily we might have missed connecting. What an astonishing thing, a relationship.

And I wonder what good it does my brain to sit here imagining turtles, buffalo and spaceships and speculating about the nature of human relationships as found among the clouds. This is what wonder does. It interrupts the important business of being important. It loosens my mind’s grip on what it thinks it already knows and invites me to look again, to see possibilities where I previously saw only the familiar.

I think wonder is also one of the great gifts I bring to my relationships. To look at someone I’ve known for decades and wonder who they are becoming. To meet a stranger without deciding too quickly who they must be. To recognize that the person standing before me is no more finished becoming than the cloud passing overhead.

And then another question arrives. Are we humans the only creatures who wonder? Does a buffalo ever stop chewing, look up and admire a cloud shaped like itself? Does a hawk recognize the beauty beneath its wings? Does the turtle know the wonder of being able to feel at home in two worlds?

I don’t know. Assuming that wonder belongs only to humans may just be another way we make ourselves the center of everything. So I sit. I watch. Clouds gather. Clouds separate. Clouds become something, then something else, then disappear.

Just like relationships. Just like my life. Nothing holding its shape forever. Exposure to the elements relentlessly changing and shaping my life and loves.

The gift of a relationship isn’t that it lasts forever, or that it becomes what we hoped. The gift is that, for some stretch of time, however brief or long, two lives find themselves sharing the same sky.

It seems amazing to me why and how we find one another, imagine one another, change together, drift apart, and sometimes discover that even the briefest connection has the deepest of meanings.

The blessing isn’t in knowing where any of it is going. The blessing is simply being here, long enough, still enough, curious enough, to look up, or down or across the way, or behind me, and notice who is passing through, with me. My relationships, like clouds, need not last forever to have mattered. Sometimes the extraordinary gift is simply that my life has shared the same sky with you, for a while.