As I’ve written many times before, clouds and rain create a sense of comfort and solace for me. I’ve known that I’m a pluviophile (what’s a pluviophile? you might ask – here’s a blog I did about it) for a few years now, and though sunshine does feel nice after a long gray winter or especially rainy days, there’s nothing quite like the mellow lighting and blanketed feeling that clouds cultivate.
There are many types of cloud formations, I’m finding. Looking through the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Weather, I’m overwhelmed by all of the terminology simply trying to identify the clouds in my photos. Latin names slip through the pages – Cirrostratus nebulosus, Altocumulus duplicatus, Cumulus congestus, Cumulonimbus, Mammatus, Nimbostratus praecipitatio – accompanied by striking photographs of rains, storms, mackerel skies, and everything in between. Guess I’ll need to do some more research if I want to be able to classify clouds and dabble in nephology.
As spring arrives in her coat of blooms and greens tailed with lace of dramatic rains, clouds halo the mountains like silvery auras. I’ve been photographing these dark, dense nimbuses and admiring their sullen, stoic sweep across landscapes far and wide. Clouds are the true travelers, traversing crossways between plains, coasts, oceans, forests, rivers, passes, ranges, lakes. They gather, hold, and release, carrying water from one place to another. Really, that’s what all beings do – we’re all forms of pockets of water, bringing it with us from one stage of life to the next.
Thanks for enlightening me on the correct use of “nephology”! I would have thought is was the study of nephews. Seriously nice collection! I like your analogy of life forms being pockets of water standing (plants) or wandering around (legged forms) and redistributing water like the clouds. There would be no land life forms without these “mistical” hydrogen dioxide distributors. I recall in order to form a cloud, there has to be airborne particles the water molecules can attach to. If there was no land above sea level or wind to blow land particles into the atmosphere, Earth would just be a lifeless water world, as one theory on beginning of life needed lightening to trigger a chemical reaction to form life. The other theory of the beginning of life is the chemical reactions created by oceanic hypothermic vents. Either way, life is dependent on these roaming bodies! Bless you, you various shades of white and grey (is black a dark shade of grey?)! And thanks for attuning our awareness to these wonders, I usually take for granted!
Thanks, Gramps! “Mistical” is very clever indeed. Yes, clouds are very important beings that we don’t often give consideration.
As I tend to take a “big picture” perspective, I recently discovered the YouTube channel that looks at clouds from a different perspective. I was amazed at how cloud formations appear from 420 km above the Earth; so many interesting patterns! Anyone can take a live fed journey on the International Space Station at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRDh7A43yZc. This morning (June 20) I was looking down on southern BC, as it passed overhead just north of our location, then it headed east over Calgary, Alberta. Most of the path it travelled masked the land features by cloud cover, but the space journey was a cascade of fascinating varieties of cloud patterns!
Thanks for sharing! Sounds wondrous.