Reading the Clouds and the Sky

As the year was coming to an end, a Blue Moon was declared. The name conjures mysticism but it really is just a term given to the phenomenon when two full moons appear in one month. But names are names and the unusual always leads people to magic or business. Soon, over free national television, people were making the most of interpreting what this colored moon means.

For those who looked up the sky the night of the last day of the year, there was something more astounding than a moon turned blue and sad. That night, the clouds were arranged in soft squares. They were terrifyingly spread all over the space with the moonlight behind to provide eerie patterns of light.

It was a sight to behold. It was a sign waiting to be read.

Some days after, a man calling himself a seer was predicting like there was no tomorrow. It did not matter that the fortune teller was struggling with his loose dentures. His words were even looser.

That's the problem with people who predict: Death, which is predictable, is their weapon. A member of the film industry is going to die. But, of course, each year someone belonging to the film industry is going to die. What matters with this prediction is for someone to pinpoint what kind of a member, what magnitude is the celebrity of this mortal man facing his mortality? And yet, we believe what other people say of our future. We love to listen to men and women tell us what we like to hear. For every dismal reading, there is always the flattering about our love life, about our personality, about the little successes that will come our way. Things that do not need to be predicted because they belong to the everyday. In other words, "the quotidian that will have its day." The unremarkable. The everyday.

If my grandmother, Emilia, were alive today, she would have been an emeritus of the Cloud Appreciation Society. Yes, it is a real organization, with real members whose members "pledge to fight "blue-sky thinking." Their manifesto - poetry in motion really - speaks well about them. The first paragraph states: "We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned/and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them." The second paragraph declares: "We think that they are Nature's poetry,/and the most egalitarian of her displays, since/everyone can have a fantastic view of them."

The manifesto is not only about the value of the inconsequential but only to "remind people that clouds are the expressions of the/atmosphere's moods, and can be read like those of/a person's countenance."