This is from Friday morning, after it rained from afternoon to midnight. I love it when the clouds actually touch the mountains. That cloud-mountain interface is one of the best things about living where it isn’t flat. I could sit and watch this stuff all day. Sometimes in warmer weather, that’s exactly what we do around here. It’s not being lazy, it’s being enthralled.
This is the kind of thing that pulled me here. Sort of a culmination of what the peak experiences of my previous life were trying to tell me. It’s never been the civilized side of things that impresses me—culture, great institutions, architecture, the collective behavior of mass events and movements, although all of that is wondrous—but there’s something in Nature, even the weather, that goes beyond what we can make or understand.
Just my little path through the world, with many interruptions!
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
Couldn’t agree more, JHF! Anytime I can sneak into “that” interface along the east slopes of the Sandias it’s pretty magical. Makes a lot of everything else seem pretty damn small. Then again, I’m a weather geek/junkie/addict.
We were on top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine once. You drive up there. It’s only about a thousand feet, if that, but the clouds were going by really fast exactly at that altitude, with flashes of open sky & setting sun above and cloud tops at eye level! Really scary, like skimming through the very top of a cloud bank in a plane. The stuff was just streaming at us out of the west.
Amen.
“It’s not being lazy, it’s being enthralled.”
I’m going to use that line next time my husband finds me in a nature-coma. Dazing off into the distance, discovering things he just doesn’t see.