My day in clouds.

The first thing I wanted to know when I woke up to my alarm clock far too early this morning was how a jet plane with 300 people on it goes missing. People embarking on holidays, leaving home, returning home, vanishing into thin air.

An essay deadline and a rumbling in my belly prised me kicking and screaming from my nest. Cold air and work to be doing never made anyone want to get up. Its like tempting a donkey with a brick. When I walked next door to tend to the two fluffball dogs my neighbours trustingly left in my care, the sky was forebodingly dark, like grey paint swirled on a canvas, the contours and texture made in a flurry of movements by a moody artiste. I was running on tea-power alone, and the stormy attire of father sky seemed to my semi-hysterical brain to be a sign. Indeed, as I blundered blindly through the final lines of my essay, wielding an axe and slashing wildly, torrents of water and flashes of light tumbled down upon the roof.

Then, like a simile for my very existence, when I strode triumphantly out of the house to announce to Baloo that I had indeed finished the last ridiculous, elephant-sized-shit on a page of my undergraduate degree, the sky was blue and the joyous fluffy clouds had chased away the grey.

Jet planes go missing when humans get too sure of their ability to fly. Perhaps clouds are mountains we should leave unconquered, just because we can pass through them doesn’t mean we should walk all over them. But it’s just that they are so inviting, really we are more like them than we would like to admit; transient, watery and moody.

As I sidestepped, hopped and danced my way over tree roots and loose bricks of the university pathways, the whole expanse of the sky seemed to worm its way inside of me, as the elation of being free from uni set in. I breathed in the cloudless, generic pale blue Perth sky, with its cool winter breeze and begun to feel a vague sense of achievement. Suddenly I became aware I was at the end of something. I had a strange out of body experience, in which I saw a young girl, orange hair tied back in a ponytail and hidden under a woollen hat, lying in the sun in awe of everything. Seeking wisdom and learning to know herself, the peacocks, and why one shouldn’t feed ducklings bread. I’m still a little girl, what can I say, I’ll always be short, but 3 ½ years down the track, what have I learnt? I went to uni for answers and questions tumbled down upon me until I learnt to stop expecting answers. Now I am content in these shoes and I see things in the mist that I can believe in.

Where am I going? I am going to live, love and learn.

But right now I am going to lunch.

And to lunch I went. Back on the bus , into the city, up the stairs, across the bridge, along the street to stop and stare... at the cappuccino froth clouds. It looked like the crane was reaching up into the sky to catch the cloud and tie it down while it was trapped neatly between two towers of glass. I was inspired to do a little research on cloud science. I learnt that when people got enlightened and started classifying everything in the physical/metaphysical/possible world, some young dude took the trouble of conquering the clouds. He picked them up and set them into families like Nimbostratus, cirrostratus and altocumulus, along with many other names I wouldn’t try to pronounce. I figured, if he can do that, then so can I. This cloud is called Henry. He escaped the ravages of the crane.

The day was drawing to a close, and while the sun reflected on the clouds, I was roaring along the coast on my scooter. I have realised that I am not very driven or motivated to overthrow the world. Yet I feel I should be. Sometimes I am dismayed by the fact that I am quite content to watch the clouds and point out the ironies of the world. To write blogs that are premised on statements like “Today I ate a banana” and suggest that we all be nice to each other for a change and then have the audacity to think people might suddenly start doing just that. Am I just a bored white middle class youth with a blog? More or less. I think it’s important to make people smile, but that’s like the soft-core porn of activism. Piss weak. And then I can’t decide if I wouldn’t be better off contemplating the clouds, maybe that’s just what I’m meant to be doing.

I don’t know. I can only begin to wonder. And so I chased the sun to the end of the world...

And sat there and waited for the night to begin.

The use of pictures in this blog was difficult and hard to format, but more importantly, partially inspired by the wonderously creative daily photo blog of a friend, which you can/must check out here http://introducingruthie.blog.com/