Catching Clouds

A week ago I was on a retreat in Zeeland, Holland. One of the beautiful aspects of that very flat landscape are the great skies, and at times magnificent clouds.

One evening we were treated to this wonderful view: Ah, they are kissing! Or no... they are doing a mirroring exercise! Many of you readers will have done that exercise with me, where you are opposite another person, and mirror their movements.

All of us were entranced and delighted by this formation.... which, of course, lasted for a little while and then it changed.

Then for a bit it became that one of the 'creatures' was eating the other one ... and then, after some more time, the story finished. For us.

I was thinking about those clouds this morning. Since then, I had shared the first image with friends, because it was in that image where we found an 'it': a shareable event, a formation, that was remarkable and funny.

I was reflecting on how this 'it' had occurred. 'Nothing' was there, and then something, undeniably - quite a few of us watching agreed on that. We saw 'it' come about, and we roughly stayed together until the 'it' was finished... a few of us followed the story a little longer than others - but then we all lost interest and moved on.

That process is fascinating to me - and it happens again and again: earlier, looking out of my window with the morning sun, the leaves turning yellow were radiant - so beautiful that I wanted to paint them. I even felt an urgency to become a painter, and I thought I must find a painting course. - Then clouds arrived, the bright sunlit colours faded, and with it my interest in watching the autumn leaves. And the urgency to become a painter...

What we can observe is, how we are constantly creating 'something' out of the flow of occurrences. We see it, name it, and feel we have a hold on something actual. In Buddhist teaching, this is described as grasping. Shapes and forms come together and from our perspective they look a certain way - and so we have a kiss, a painter ... and a 'me'!

Again and again we adopt one moment as 'it', or define ourselves as having certain qualities. We are this, or have to do that. It feels like an imperative, like we finally found out, finally see clearly. A definite shape - and with that clarity often comes relief.

Yet, where is that cloud, the 'it', now? - Identity is always shifting, like the cloudscape. Yes, I can share the pics on my phone, and my friends laugh, and so confirm that it definitely was something ... But I cannot catch the cloud. It happened, and then something else, and something else. Now it is a memory, as is everything else that happened, pleasant or unpleasant.

A risk is that I pick out one memory, in an isolated way, and I disregard the whole flow, the context, the other clouds that helped create this one, the evening sun, the relative stillness of the wind at the time .... and really, picking out one moment, forgetting the context or flow, will inevitable lead to fixing, and so to suffering. James Low describes this as follows*

"The ground of our being is ungraspable, uncompounded, not a thing. But

we spend our whole life thinking that I am a thing, and I'm a different thing from you! So we are constantly building up and building up and building up the seemingly reliable identities of all we encounter, including ourselves. These constructs are what gets powerfully challenged when we become sick and old, since all that we've constructed starts to dissolve.

As the Buddha indicated, when you have attachment you have suffering, because you don't want what you've been attached to, to dissolve."

We make ourselves heavy with the burden of this 'I' which is always in flow and interaction with the world around. - Can we live more lightly? Take ourselves more lightly?

If you want to explore that, with interaction, movement and meditation, you can join the course 'Take yourself Lightly' on zoom, starting 3 October 2024. If you are interested in signing up to receive more blogposts, please do that below.

*Used with thanks (from Space is the greatest friend we have, James Low 2017)