By now most of you know I love clouds and that I am often moved to photograph them. I am truly blessed to be living in an area that provides space among the mountains, rivers and lakes of the Catskill Park. By space, I am referring to it in the most open way. Space to breath, space to dream, space to contemplate the duality of life and in that contemplation seek for harmony and balance. In the outside world of congestion, competition, chaos and seeming imbalance it is all too easy to take sides, draw boundary lines and create borders blaming the other for all our disappointments and perceived evils. We are living in a time of great transition and in a time like this we can welcome these changes and celebrate the great mystery or resist the natural flow of existence. By now you may be wondering what all this has to do with clouds well clouds are in constant movement and so are we and everything that exists in the universe. Our Mother Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the Sun.

When the majority of one’s time is lived indoors in institutions and cities away from the natural world and her seasons and cycles of growth and decay where we witness the endless flow of birth and death in a continuous process of regeneration we forget what we lived and celebrated in song, prayer, ceremony and dance. That memory exists in all of us it is in our DNA and if we truly care about life and appreciate all that naturally sustains it we may choose to awaken from this dream and illusion of isolation and self-importance and realize we are not as self-sufficient as we might think we are and that many of us take a lot for granted. Freedom without responsibility is not freedom it is disaster. Sunday evening we shared in a welcoming circle celebrating the birth of a child in our community. The parents asked each of us to share whatever we would like to offer in the way of gifts, blessings, talents and wisdom to this new generation. It might be time for all of us to consider and respond to those questions and to gather together and share our thoughts and feelings while we still have the freedom to act responsibly.

The image I call Radiant Sky is for me about Light and Shadow and their continual dance I’m also reminded that the brightest light casts the darkest shadow we might want to consider using that light to illuminate our shadows thus helping us make our world a brighter place to be living in.