It feels like all weekend we have visited friends, in their exciting new not quite converted barns.
If we count it up, it probably wasn’t quite 24 hours, from yesterday tea time-ish, to today, high tea time-ish, but nobody needs to look at a clock or reach for a calculator, it’s not about time or numbers, not even the fortuitous fortune cookie kind.
It’s about four hung over people looking up at the giant sky, watching miles of clouds swathe by.
There are grey whale clouds, lumberously turning. There is a layer of snowy fuzz that looks as though it must be soft and comfortable, a dream hammock. The lathery white cloud, whose bubbles and peaks best make identifiable shapes, moves swift in a high breeze.
I lay in the sun chair, and the clouds pass over, and my friends make coffee, food and fun of me for falling abruptly asleep on the sofa last night. We spin jokes between us, a whole tapestry of them. Their dogs sleep, ours hustles for a thrown stone.
Some kind of providence has brought us here, under the clouds, my internal monologue reflects. One day I will close my eyes and the clouds will be passing and I will not see them. I will cease, and the world will carry on. I am one tiny drop in the vast universe, entirely unique, entirely expendable, calmly exulting.
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P.S : That Vietnamese coffee in your picture is pretty great :)
One time, several years back,, a friend asked me what view I would miss most when I die (if there is cognizance after death) and I answered that I would miss lying on my back on a bench in the woods beside my garden--where there is sparse leaf canopy above me, and a breeze blowing, shifting the green leaves, exposing the azure sky full of fluffy-tufts-of-cotton-type clouds. Yep. Still is the view I will miss most. :-)
I love the idea of the pagan afterlife, where you create your own heaven and it's called the Summer Lands. Mine is a beach surrounded by fields and woods :-)