idleness and clouds

Long, uninterrupted blocks of idle time seem to be the most conducive to writing. While it wasn't great for organizing or researching longer works (I usually lacked the materials and physical space necessary for extensive note-taking, let alone access to encyclopedias of any kind),  I recall that I wrote frequently during my backpacking travels. I mostly travelled alone, kept a book and notebook with me at all times, and had many long periods of downtime in between activities, in which there was nothing to do but read, write, or simply think, even if I had wanted to do something else. I was not only allowed, but forced to be alone with my thoughts. While I can't claim that it was always pleasant, it really does feel like a lost luxury these days. Calls to adventure aside, I begin to think that that roving, lonely lifestyle was the most natural state of existence for someone like me.

While flying is an almost universally abysmal experience - bureaucratic, callous, commercial, an A-Z of pejoratives if you like - there is still something magical about the clouds themselves, perhaps in the act of looking down on them, though that sounds too hostile or paternalistic. I can negate that, though, for the best part is being among them, the sense of climbing a mountain range in the sky, filled with the dwellings of some colorless people. Rather, they are a canvas on which to paint any and all possible colors. Their steeples and minarets are all possible architectures from all possible cultures at once. Their children pass up and down the steps of cathedral cities as templates for a sort of prismatic future, where each one of them can become all things that they have the slightest inclination to be, as time stretches out to infinity, and layers itself one iteration atop another. 

Then the wind blows, and it is all obliterated.

While I don't remember when it happened, I feel like there was one moment in my life when the clouds were the most beautiful, and every sky I have seen since then contains some amount of that moment, some tiny, reflected grain of an image imprinted forever on my spirit. This living, but static image, so dimly recalled as to be impossible to reproduce, may be the closest thing in this universe to eternity.