Cottontails and clouds

If you know how to look, you will still see shapes and forms in the clouds. When you were younger, you likely imagined they were bunnies or faces. I am still free to use my imagination at any time, but I am more likely to see bunnies hopping down here among the dew drenched clover on solid ground. To say that the shapes and forms we see in the ice crystals above us are merely random and abstract may well reflect a failure of our imagination. But the cloud never was actually a bunny.

What is it that we do not see with our minds – the empty expanses of green lawn or blue sky? What about the blackness in between the stars, those dots of bright light that we look for - a few stars that many people throughout time have imagined could be connected into a figure of Orion the hunter holding up the bunny that would sustain his less-than-imaginary life. I don’t think that the blackness is just a void, although most of what we do actually see when we look around us – upwards and downwards - are shapes and lines and points. Our imagination changes everything. Suddenly we see something in the middle of apparent emptiness.

Vapor floats above me, drifting towards where the Little Dipper is veiled behind brilliant blue repetitions of reflections of countless photons streaming through the morning air. In a moment, sun light stabbs through spaces in green leaves of trees into eyes that I had recently rubbed free of sleep. I think that I did in fact see two bunnies, their cotton tails the color of the cloud passing over my upturned head only two hours after dawn.

I imagined that the two bounding bunnies were together, but they were bunnies alive in my vision for only a very few seconds. And I did not stare long enough up at the cloud to see more than wisps of a cottontail.

Orion was napping.