Whenever you lie anywhere on a cot in a sleeping bag with a delicious red plaid flannel lining, your very dreaming might feel cozy like floating upon a gentle cloud. If that cot and red sleeping bag is inside a fire lookout at eight or nine thousand feet, and it is an August day with monsoon moisture lowered down around your ears, then you might actually be inside of a cloud as you sleep. Or are you asleep? You might be on duty with your binoculars in hand, useless, as you bend to the glass to examine how the moist noses of a zillion water particles press against your windows. Maybe any minute a shift in wind will nudge all local fog away from your peak, and maybe not.
But now all is white. It’s not like being inside of an airliner where the perplexities of a tiny movie, the miniature bottle of gin, the too-near breathing of a stranger cause you to stare out the window and wish to be seated on the wing. There one watches the clouds as if they are a movie—sees them as ripples below or as white ghosts flickering. On duty in a fire lookout, on a day of limited to zero visibility, you live inside the cloud.
All summer you’ve watched clouds change shape. That distant formation of cumulus you watched last evening at sunset, those mighty orange hulled ships over the Mogollon Rim, that shape of animal over the North Rim, those ever changing lumps and curves that stretch their edges up to the troposphere, that is where you sit for a morning, or a day, or even overnight: there you are with your headlamp illuminating the next page of a Margaret Drabble novel and outside an eerie quiet will let you know you will go to sleep inside a cloud.
As if the mist is a homeopathic remedy for memory recovery, you feel other clouds waft against your night: those long tattered fingers of white that spill over the ridge between Mt. Elden and the Peaks. You watched them one autumn while ravens rolled in flight above and wondered, what next, what next? That fog on a morning in Maine where the masts of schooners disappear into the white over Camden harbor. Remember how orange maple leaves would pop out of the mist like unexpected, giant butterflies?
Once upon a time you walked past stonewalls and sheep up and over a pass in the Lake District in England seeking the youth hostel in the next town. Your steps took you into a cloud there; your even breathing took you into a mist of uncertainties. Your legs aren’t calibrated for this landscape. How far is it? The cloud against your face doesn’t say, but on you go. Maybe you really should turn back to the known place on your map, but walking through a cloud might lead you into mystery, and being comfortable with mystery is your life’s dream. After hours of mist against your cheeks, you do find the next town, the next youth hostel—Butharlyp Howe on Easedale Road in Grasmere—where you make new friends who take you out for New Year’s Eve in a basement bar painted black. They drag you onto the floor for slam dancing and merry flirtations and urgent kisses from men and women alike at the stroke of midnight.
And years later you trust clouds again. You think sleeping inside one might nudge your dreaming to reveal the new shape of your very own mystic’s life. You sleep inside expansion, your very dreams marveling at the possibilities. And sometime in the dark, the cloud evaporates. Listen, that harsh cry of bird is the neon blue Steller’s Jay who wants to be your alarm clock this morning. Get up, get up! You stand by a cot in a fire lookout, greeting the sunrise with your prayerful attention, stretching as if your arms and head might pass through the roof unimpeded, as if you haven’t already been rising all night, drifting, interpenetrating the very landscape for miles around, becoming cloud-like yourself, a visible magician, a being that trusts evaporation, a soul who knows molecules will change one day into dew, into trickling live water, into the shape of next and next and next.
