The Clouds

 

Yesterday on my commute home, there was something just spectacular about the clouds.  It was so incredible, in fact, that I had to get off busy Highway 14 and onto a country road to take some pictures.  Of course, by the  time I did that, the light had changed and they were not quite as spectacular as  they had been, but I took some pictures any how.

Here they are:

 

 

The Mist (NOT Stephen King's Mist)

This morning on the way to work there was a heavy mist--or maybe you would call it ground fog.  Whatever it was, it sucked my imagination into gear.  I kept thinking of besotted fey revelers dancing in the meadows and between the trees in the woods, playing wooden flutes or piccolos and spinning tendrils of magical mist from their fingers and toes as they spun and dipped and twirled.

Fall is here, winter is coming, and the fey must revel while they can, before winter seals shut the doors to the Otherworld.

This is out of focus--my hand must have been shaking--but in a way, that makes it magical too.  It might be the view that Oberon sees through his inebriated vision, squinting east and thinking, "Blimey!  The sun's coming up.  We must away before it breaks the horizon."



I can almost see Oberon hustling down this slope, a squirming pixie under each arm and Titania trailing behind, bewailing her misplaced tiarra.  "Hush, fairy, we must be through the portal  ere the first ray breaks the horizon or frozen here we will be til the moonrise."
 

Is that a swan maiden, swimming in the mist?



No.  It is a swan lad.  A lonely swan lad as his swan lady is no longer with him.  :(



Ponies in the mist.  Do they look so tired because the fey ones have been riding them all night long through the light of the moon?



 I was wrapped by the mist in this picture.  You can't see it as well as I could, but there is almost a dome of mist to the right of the trees.  I wondered if that might possibly be the invisible location of the fairy portal....I imagine  their swirling sashes and garlands of flowers  and their long, silky hair floating behind them as they vanish into that dome  fleeing the first light of the sun....



You can see the dome of mist a little clearer here--just to the right of the trees.   What an appropriate place to hide a portal to the Fey Otherworld--in the midst of a cornfield



Did a group of leprechauns fill the air with the fragrant pipe smoke that spread out and hung in the air long after they'd gone back to the Otherworld?


See how the mist separates into bands?  I love that.



Uh oh...the sun is peeking through the trees!  Run, fairies, run!



Another band of mist.  A very pronounced one!



There is a little fire here, under the mist.  I thought I saw some leprechauns making s'mores there as  they puff their long, hand crafted pipes.  What are they smoking anyhow?  :-}



Well, too late for any of the faire folk still outside the portal.  They are frozen in place now, until the moonrise.



This picture does not do justice to the beauty of the sun hitting the mist and spreading out its amber rays across the surfaces of it.

Cool Reading from my Therapist

One of the things my therapist and I have been working on is my sadness regarding the fact that I never had the children I wanted, and now it is too late.


She gave me this little piece of prose which was written by the father of an autistic son.  In it, he is trying to explain what it is like to have an "imperfect" child.  I love this piece. 

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability--to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel.  It's like this...

When you are going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip--to Italy.  You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans.  The Coliseum.  The Michelangelo David.  The gondolas in Venice.  You may earn some handy phrases in Italian.  It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives.  You pack your bags and off you go.  Several hours later, the plane lands.  The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say.  "What do you mean Holland??  I signed up for Italy!  I'm supposed  to be in Italy.  All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan.  They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of pestilence, famine, and disease.  It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guidebooks.  And you must learn a whole new language.  And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place.  It's slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around...and you begin to notice that Holand has windmills...Holland has tulips...Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy...and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there.  And for the rest of your life, you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go.   That's what I had planned."

The pain of that will never, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss..

But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the  ery special, the very lovely things....about Holland.

Source:  Welcome to Holland by E.P. Kingsley. 

Now, isn't that just beautiful?

I like that it doesn't tell you that you should not grieve for your loss--but it also tells you that you should not make your grief for that loss the total focus of your life.  That even though you didn't get what you wanted, you can still have good things in your life to appreciate.

It's like  that old song--"If you can't be with the one you love, baby, love the one you're with."

(Only without the nasty sexual overtone that can be implied by those lyrics.  LOL)