Holding Onto Clouds: A Sky Reflection

Spring - Week 22 - On the Wisdom of Restless Skies

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

The sky here refuses to be ignored. It stretches so wide and commanding that even the most earth-bound among us find ourselves craning our necks. Squinting into that endless blue canvas that shifts and transforms from dawn to dusk. But this morning, I stand on my deck with coffee growing cold in my hands, watching low gray clouds settle into the foothills, and cling to the mountainsides like sheep wandering through Scottish highlands. The mountains themselves have disappeared into a mysterious gray-green haze. Their ridge-lines softened into something ancient and unknowable.

Colorado is supposed to be dry. That's what everyone said when we moved here from California. “You'll love the low humidity,” they promised. “Three hundred days of sunshine.” But these past six weeks have rewritten the rules entirely. We've had double the rain than Seattle, turning our high desert into something lush and almost tropical. The scrub oak glows electric green, wildflowers carpet meadows that were brown and brittle just months ago, and everywhere there's the sound of water dripping, running where water rarely runs.

And with all this unexpected moisture comes the clouds. Oh, the clouds. They begin as these heavy gray blankets draped across the foothills, obscuring the familiar summits until the range becomes a suggestion. But I've learned to read the morning's quiet drama, watching as Colorado's persistent sun works its daily magic. By mid-morning, those low-hanging shrouds begin to lift and thin, burning away to reveal the mountains beneath like a slow unveiling.

This burning off of the morning clouds sets the stage for what's to come. As the sun climbs higher and the earth warms, I can see new clouds already beginning to build back in the high country. Different clouds now, these ones bright white and growing taller by the hour. The air grows thick with possibility, that peculiar pressure that every Coloradan learns to feel in their bones. You can sense it coming, this daily transformation from the morning's gentle obscurity to afternoon's dramatic promise of thunder rolling down from the heights.

Then comes the real show. By two or three in the afternoon, those innocent morning clouds have become architectural marvels, cumulonimbus cathedrals reaching thirty thousand feet into the thin air. They dwarf the mountains themselves, these towering monuments to atmospheric drama. The clouds develop their own weather systems, their own geography of updrafts and downdrafts, their own mysterious logic.

But it's always the mammatus clouds that stop me in my tracks. Those strange, bulbous formations that hang from the storm's belly like ripe fruit about to fall. The first time I saw them, I thought the sky was melting. They look so heavy, so substantial, as if gravity has finally remembered these suspended masses of water and decided to reclaim them. They create an optical illusion that the heavens themselves might come tumbling down, that the boundary between earth and sky has become negotiable.

When the storms finally break here, they do so with a theatrical flourish that puts California's predictable weather to shame. Lightning fractures the sky in brilliant white veins, thunder rolls across the plains like boulders tumbling down the mountain slopes, and rain falls in great sheets that turn the world silver. With my sweeping view of the Front Range, I can watch it all unfold. The advancing curtain of water, the way the light changes from gold to green to an eerie purplish-gray that makes everything look like an old photograph.

What surprises me is how I've come to crave this drama. As a child, I would hide from thunderstorms in the UK, cowering under blankets while the sky raged overhead. Now I find myself drawn outside, standing on the deck to feel the thunder reverberate through my chest like a second heartbeat. The lightning sets something alive behind my eyes. Not fear anymore, but exhilaration. There's something intoxicating about witnessing such raw power, about being small beneath this enormous theater of wind and water and electricity. These afternoon storms don't just wash the air clean; they wash something clean in me too, leaving me feeling awake and electric, humming with the storm's own frequency.

In the midst of all this, my sense of place becomes completely unmoored. The familiar landmarks that usually orient me, that tell me which direction I'm facing, how far I am from town, where home sits in relation to the world, all vanish behind walls of water. It's disorienting in the most wonderful way, like stepping into a fairy tale where the rules of geography no longer apply. Colorado ceases to be Colorado and becomes somewhere limitless and unknowable, a place where anything might emerge from the magical tempest.

There's something both humbling and comforting about this daily theater. The sky here commands presence in a way that California's endless blue never did. There, the weather was a constant, reliable, predictable, occasionally monotonous in its perfection. Oh how I wished to see clouds there! But here, the sky is a daily companion, restless and changeable, offering a different story every day.

As I watch these clouds build and dissipate, build and dissipate, again and again, I find myself thinking about the restlessness in my belly. The way I can't seem to settle any longer, that a storm feels like it is constantly brewing, an electric energy that won't let me rest.

I've been doing better lately, or so I tell myself on the good days. But these afternoon storms remind me that I'm not yet at peace, that I'm still riding out my own weather, where some days bring clear skies and others bring the kind of turbulence that leaves me breathless. I keep waiting for the season to change, for these internal storms to finally pass, but they seem to have their own timeline that I can't predict or control.

Maybe that's what this feeling is - this sense of being unmoored that mirrors what happens during the storms, but without the wonder. These days there's something unnamed floating through me, something I can't quite catch or understand. Is it grief for things I've lost, or grief for things I never had? Is it the weight of feeling untethered, like I'm now drifting through my own life without an anchor? Sometimes I think if I could just name it, I could weather it better. But it shifts like these clouds, always changing shape before I can get a clearer look. As if I'm watching it all from very far away.

So I find myself cataloging small joys with desperate precision. The way morning light hits the now grown in wet aspen leaves, the sound of a meadowlark's liquid song, the way everything grows so impossibly green after all this rain. These moments of wonder feel like lifelines, bright spots in what has otherwise been a difficult stretch. It's strange how you can simultaneously feel gratitude for beauty and be pulled downward by an inexplicable sadness. How joy and sorrow can coexist like different weather systems in the same sky.

The irony isn't lost on me that I'm cherishing these cloudy days, holding onto them like old friends, knowing that summer's relentless heat will soon drive them away. By July, the afternoon storms will become less frequent, the morning clouds will burn off earlier, and we'll return to the clearer, drier skies that define a typical Colorado summer. I'll miss these daily dramas, these conversations with the sky.

Perhaps that's what draws me to the clouds - their temporary nature, their constant transformation. They remind me that weather, both atmospheric and emotional, is transient. The heavy gray that feels so permanent at dawn will shift and change, giving way to something else entirely. The storms that seem so overwhelming in the moment eventually pass, leaving behind clearer air and that distinctive smell of rain on dry earth, making you want to breathe deeper.

Watching the morning's low clouds lift and transform from where I stand, I realize I'm still learning to hold space for both the beauty and the struggle, for the wonder and the weight.

Tomorrow there will be new clouds, a different sky, another chance to watch it all unfold again. The heavens offering their daily reminder that change is the only constant, and I must allow myself the same grace I give these unpredictable skies.

---

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane