clouds

Do your clouds hang low? Do they drift to and fro?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can you see them in a bow?
Can you throw them over your shoulder like a continental soldier?
Do your clouds hang low? Do they drift to and fro?

It is easier to write in the abstract and about random details.

Descriptions of sights and sounds and reflections on thoughts, moments, words.

Ideas are easier, safer, less complicated than realities.

And so I write in colors, smearing them across the page with messy, unstructured sentences; adding notes of sounds when it works, when my mind connects the two.

The colors, the sounds, the movements are what make the realities make sense. They are the context, the lines that give shape to everything that unfolds within the moments of each day.

And I (we) need both the context and the reality. They are interwoven, connected at the seams, held in careful tension with one another.

It is easier to write in the abstract. It is easier to write about random quirks.

About the clouds. The weather. The food. The traffic. Hospitality. Grace. Love.

And yet the context forms the reality. And the reality anchors the context to the world. The context loses its brightness if it doesn't fill the reality of relationships and work and daily rhythms. And the reality is without its light if it's only seen through the shadows of other contexts.

Offering up both means letting go of the fear that the reality will be misunderstood.

Offering up both means letting go of the fear that the context will be disregarded, that the colors will be changed out for stereotypes and misconceptions and the false coverings of those things that just aren't.

Offering up both means trusting that those receiving will reach forward for both context and reality- without letting one drift off like a wayward cloud, hanging low upon the mountain tops.

It means hoping that maybe words can express that which is whole and warring, seamless and contradictory, balanced while also completely and utterly out of sync.

Hoping that words can make sense of that which can't be explained away no matter what context you place it in.