I share a poem below inspired by the clouds of the Swiss Alps and the Himalays. I am so grateful for what they have showed me — the potency of liminal zones between states of being; the gaps, transitions, interstices, between life and death, emptiness and creation, stability and chaos. Their numinous ways speak to how energy and form emerge from the void, from the in-between spaces, in a universal process of transformation where destruction or emptiness is a precursor to new life and beauty.

 
Interstitials: On Clouds
 
In craggy pools on tidal shores
high up in sepia skeleton ridges
we the interstitials
are the ones of the in-between places
 
Sun scatterers, wind drinkers
molten sparks of midnight storms
spinning golden threads

Mist at our fingertips
diamonds in our hair
suspended breaths

Elemental tongues
piercing time

In the void
we defy gravity
making new life
 
You breathe out, we breathe you in

There’s secrets here
of how dust plankton pollen spores
nucleate,
crystallising into forms not quite fire nor water nor earth
but something ribboning in between

Dance with our wildness
pour into our ragged headlands
sing to us of ferment, storm, sublimation
of ever emerging skin, peachy soft
beneath the surface of your suppositions 
 
You breathe out, the mountains breathe you in

What if you learned to let go just as we let go
 
What if you trusted that from emptiness
you too can scatter ice to make stars
 
What if you too were a breath
exchanged between mountain faces
 
What if your storms could tear
at the fabric of domesticity
 
What if you could hold on to
absolutely nothing
 
Only to be born again
 
And what if you believed, just for a moment
that the earth would bind you to everything
if you just let it in

(📷 thank you to Romano Salis for the opening photo of a rainbow cloud and closing mirror lake 🌈☁️ )