Cannery Row, Monterey, California
“The thief left it behind: the moon at my window.” ~ Ryōkan
Clouds cruise across the peninsula sky as if by time-lapse, stringing out and flowing in wisps, like bits of a dream or fragments of a forgotten passion. You can photograph these clouds, but the efforts always fail to capture the vastness, the sheer splendor, and magnificence of these sky-wide swirls of blue and white. Expanding and reforming, they seem to take the shape of an enormous human spine with ribs stretching and morphing into the wings of a divine messenger.
The moment-to-moment transformation of these clouds gives rise to urgency, images appearing and disappearing like a life-size Rorschach test. Percepts splinter into figures drawn from the hidden layers of our psyche, impressions offered up as a gift to share with a friend or loved one, a vibrant expression of our human spirit. Driven by the Pacific trade winds, they stream in over the ocean, glowing white in the late afternoon sun, vaporous masses transforming into translucent spirals, tumbling and dissipating into an empty blue sky.
Often these images hold a longing for another time and place, lying in the cool grass on a summer day with a best friend and calling out imaginary characters with deep satisfaction, void of the poison of self-consciousness. There’s nothing for us to do about clouds except to watch them or ignore them, and that seems to be the way of things. Our only response as they dissolve is to hold them in our hearts and bear witness as they spread across the heavens and vanish into nothing.
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You can preview and order my new book Fragments of Light at https://robertfeist.com/fragments-of-light/