I Was Thinking... Slowly Changing

We are lucky enough to have a trailer in a campground that overlooks a lake. Usually, the campground is a quite active place with families and kids enjoying a weekend away from home.
But every so often, it is a quiet weekend with few campers in attendance, and nothing but the birds and rustling leaves for sounds. It is these rare times when I get to just sit on the deck, read a book, maybe nap, or just enjoy the sights and sounds around me.
In our fast paced, get it done now environment, these times are few and far between. So, on an early Friday afternoon I took advantage of the surroundings and just enjoyed the lake, the sky and a few seagulls that passed by.
It has been a long time since I just enjoyed watching clouds. This was one of those days when the sky was saturated with mounds of clouds of all sizes and shapes. They seemed to just hang there like fluffy balls of cotton suspended by wires against a vivid blue background. It wasn’t a windy day, so they just stayed where they were. Or so I thought.
The breeze could barely move the leaves at the top of the trees but as I looked back at the stationary clouds, I realized they weren’t the same as they had been just minutes before. They were moving and reshaping constantly, but I just couldn’t seem to catch them at it.
It was like the big clock in my elementary school. The second hand was in continuous motion, but the minute hand never seemed to move, yet it did. Even if I stared at it intensely, I could barely detect the big hand’s movement. It seemed the same with the clouds.
At one moment, in the sky I could see a blue lake surrounded by shorelines of white with a small passageway to the large blue ocean of sky. But when I next looked up from my book, the harbor entrance was gone, and the lake had conformed to a totally new shape.
I watched these seemingly unmovable floating masses as they constantly transformed themselves. These undulating piles of white and grey, with pockets of blue poking through, seemed to change right before your eyes with you hardly noticing. Clouds that had been separated soon piled together in mountainous shapes. White wispy areas floated at the edges and soon dissipated into nothing.
Others became arranged like quilts piled upon each other in an array of unruly shapes and sizes. Connected one minute and broken apart the next, yet I didn’t seem to observe it happening.
These freaks of nature had no business being suspended in air with no visible means of support. But they didn’t subscribe to my view of reality. There were no straight lines, right angles, or circular or even oval shapes. Their formations didn’t resemble anything made by man.
I couldn’t explain where they had come from on this afternoon or where they had gone just several hours later. What I had observed to be a stagnant arrangement of nature was in fact a relentlessly changing environment. Nothing stayed the same even if I didn’t notice. Even the lake seemed to reflect this theme. The slight breeze created a perpetual movement of ripples moving across the lake. There seemed to be a purpose and plan as the lake seemed to move before my eyes from shoreline to shoreline, and yet it really didn’t go anywhere.
For a couple of minutes, writing down my observations made me feel somewhat insightful as I took note of the world around me. Yet all I needed to do was go into the trailer and look into the mirror.
It then became obvious, that these changes were also happening to us, right before our eyes and often we didn’t seem to notice.
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Photo:  I was thinking Ron Albright