Clouds

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now . . . . .

Tim took this photo while we paddled the Kelso River in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) last Saturday.  It was not until after we got home that I noticed the clouds reflected in the water. While paddling I only saw the water lily. So often there is so much beauty around us that we cannot take it all in.

It felt so good to be back in our canoe paddling. We were with friends, one of whom had never been in the BWCA. It was a perfect day to take a newbie. The sky was so blue, the winds light and the portages were short.  It’s not always that way up there on the water. But that day it was an incredible moment for her and the rest of us.

Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now”, also called “Clouds” has been playing in my brain lately. In part because of Tim’s photo but also because like many of you, I have watched on YouTube, Joni sing it over and over again with Brandi Carlisle at the Newport Folk.

As Carlisle wrote about that moment, “Something’s lost but something’s gained… in living everyday.” Joni’s looked at life from so many sides and she came out of the   storm singing like a prophet.  After all she’s been through she returned to the Newport Folk Festival stage after 53 years and I will never forget sitting next to her while she stopped this old world for a while…”

In an interview with Gene Shay on the Folklore Program back in March 1967, Joni says this before playing her brand new song “Both Sides Now”, “I should tell people a little about it. I was reading a book, and I haven’t finished it yet, called, ‘Henderson the Rain King.’ And there’s a line in it that I especially got hung up on that was about when he was flying to Africa and searching for something, he said that in an age when people could look up and down at clouds, they shouldn’t be afraid to die. And so I got this idea ‘from both sides now.” There are lots of sides to everything, and so the song is called ‘From Both Sides, Now. “  

Both Sides Now has been covered over 1000 times. I think it’s popularity and power comes from the truth it sings to our souls. There are lots of sides to everything. We hold on to the beauty of the clouds reflected on the still waters and we know there will be other days of white caps and rain. 

As the poet of Ecclesiastes wrote, “to everything there is a season . . A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;”

Thank you to the poets, photographers and prophets who stop this old world for a while.