JOYFUL PIECE #147

Why does a cloud never die?

Last Tuesday I wrote about the documentary on Thich Nhat Hahn, A Cloud Never Dies.

I wanted to have a perfect image of a cloud for the post. After taking several photos, I was not completely satisfied that I had captured that quintessential puffy, pillowy cloud that we were trained to draw in kindergarten.

As I walked around the neighborhood, stopping often to gaze at the sky, I had great difficulty in matching what I was seeing with the preconceived image in my mind.

Sometimes the cloud would be merging with another cloud. Sometimes the cloud would be disintegrating.

Then it dawned on me: clouds are not static. Clouds are ever-changing due to the whims of the energy in the atmosphere. Clouds are tugged and torn by winds, expanded by the sun, subject to electrostatic forces. In short: clouds are imaginary constructs of our minds. There are no white clouds, no dark clouds but aggregations and dispersals of water molecules. The cloud is in eternal transformation.

Eternal transformation is something humans seeking “safety” and permanence find hard to accept. We want things to remain as we think they are, or could be— an impossibility given the dynamic, kinetic forces that play on everything, every aspect of our lives.

As I made my way home it dawned on me that political concepts resemble cloud dynamics.

The corrupt actions of the POTUS regime are perhaps founded on the insecurities of the MAGA movement and other factions who wanted a cloud that existed only in their imagination. The current regime appears to have manipulated those expectations and promised something that can never exist because we are ever in transformation. Is the POTUS unable to accept the changes that the revelation of crimes, including connection to the Epstein national security and sex-trafficking scandal, will bring?

While compassionately resisting, should we not be joyful while the winds of change tug at our own ever-transforming “clouds”?

☁️

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