The Sky Has a Story to Tell

Last year, I began keeping a journal of my impressions of clouds for a course I was taking. Inspired by Alexandra Harris’ Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies, I observed daytime clouds, heading outside when weather permitted to gaze up and wait for some flood of poetic emotion to overtake me. On rainier or cooler days, I stayed inside, pulling a chair up to my large living room window, recording my thoughts. Sometimes I even drew the clouds themselves.

Harris posited that the “provisionality” of clouds, lacking a “single authoritative version,” allowed them to serve as creative inspiration for writers and artists. “Clouds give out the merest hint of shape,” Harris wrote, arguing that the observer adds detail to “fill out […] whatever the observer thinks he sees.” This may be one reason why many definitions of the word “cloud” appear to avoid referring to a specific visual appearance.

The seeming fluidity of clouds, which Harris wrote about, and which remains consistent with the nebulous definitions (pun intended), reflected my own observations with these celestial formations. Despite an initial reticence to “have fun” and “let loose” with this exercise, eventually I abandoned my desire to learn the appropriate meteorological names of clouds and embraced the very spirit that free-form cloud-watching demands. Clouds were alternatively “cotton candy…