Are Words Like Clouds?

Can they ever be?

Like life itself, clouds are constantly changing. They are constantly moving, The wind propels them while reshaping them. No cloud is ever the same from one moment to the next.

What if words were like clouds? As they float across the sky of our mind they continuously morph into new words. Together, they form phrases and sentences and ideas only to be replaced by new phrases and sentences and ideas.

There are days when there is not a cloud in our sky; a word drought. Then there are days when the words start billowing into huge storm clouds, growing and growing until they burst forth in a torrent of language. We can barely capture those words as they flood over us.

We can look at a real cloud in the real sky and try to come up with the words to describe it. We can write a poem about that cloud. But before we can even finish the poem the cloud has changed into something completely different.

Are words our attempt to stop all movement and freeze everything into a solidified, unchanging view? Are they an attempt to capture a fleeting moment of NOW in order to intellectualize it, conceptualize it? Can words really stop and block the natural flow? Can they really help us to experience that fleeting moment of NOW?

Words can never be like clouds. They can only point towards clouds. They can never be the experience of clouds. Once a word is written down it stops moving and becomes a part of the past, pointing towards a memory. Reading and rereading words pulls us out of the present NOW. Real clouds exist only in the NOW, changing with each new moment of that NOW.

When real clouds burst forth in torrential rain the water continues to flow until it once again becomes a cloud. Like life itself, this flow never stops. It merely changes form.

We can stand naked upon the earth, our arms spread wide and our heads looking up into the sky as a cloudburst of rain washes over us. The best way to experience that is with a mind empty of all thoughts and phrases and sentences and words.

We can then try to describe that experience to someone and our words can point towards the experience but they can never be the experience.

What if WE were like clouds? Would there still be a need for words? What kind of experience would that be?

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