Hope.

If I would have painted the clouds I saw yesterday, you may have said, “Well, that’s just wrong. Clouds don’t look like that.” But I saw them. From the pool. I was doing laps and out of the goggled corner of my eye, I saw something so blue, so white, I had to stop. I took off my goggles and looked up at the sky. It was so beautiful. The sky was blue. The kind of blue that artists try to invent and call their own. And the clouds — they weren’t puffs of white, or animals, or anything familiar — it was as if nature had taken its incredibly large brush and flung it across the sky. Not contained by recognizable shapes, but just pure motion. I told myself to breathe and look. A part of me wanted to jump out the pool and grab my camera, so I could capture it, stop it, but it was a windy day, and I knew if I took the time to dry off, go upstairs, get the camera, the magic could be gone, offering this vision of hope (For that’s what it felt like – pure hope) to some other person, looking up in the summer sky. I didn’t move. I didn’t want to miss it. Because maybe that’s the way hope works — it’s always there in constant motion — we think it has to stop for us, but maybe, maybe we have to stop for it. Just stop and see it. Feel it, believe in it. And I do. Fear wanted me to race after my camera, stop time. Hope told me to just stop. Feel. And believe.

I don’t want it to end. So I tell you. And it lives on. And maybe you tell someone else, and maybe we all live a little lighter, a little more hopeful, a little less fearful, under the ever changing strokes of white and blue. That can’t be wrong.