Seven days of nature photos, day 6: Clouds

And this is the point where I began to understand the reason for this exercise.

I wanted to add a cloud photo to the list. I've always been fascinated by clouds. Clouds are a lot like fire: constantly changing, never appearing the same to two people even if they view it at the same time. No one else is seeing the same thing, and no one else will ever again see the same thing - including you. Once this moment has passed, the cloud you are viewing will be gone forever.

I've taken a lot of pictures of clouds over the years, and I've included some of them on this blog. At least, I did in the early years. In the last few years my blogging has slacked off. In part it's been because I've been extremely busy. Which is sad and ironic: At the time I've been having more things going on in my life than in a long time, I've had the least time to keep a record of those things on my blog. And the place I have been keeping a record, Facebook, I have always considered to be an ephemeral platform, owned and regulated by someone with their own business reasons for doing things. It's Mark Zuckerberg's playground, he's just letting us use it for the moment.

I scrolled through thousands of blog entries looking for interesting pictures of clouds, and realized I hadn't labeled them in a way that would make them easy to pull out. So I created a new label, Clouds, and started labeling old posts with it. I realized then that I had lots of recent cloud posts that I've posted to Facebook but never posted to my blog. Indeed, I hadn't posted much of anything to my blog for the last few years.

When I was presented with this challenge, my friend specifically suggested pulling the photos from blog posts. I think he was actually trying to encourage me to take a look at my blog, see what it used to be, and see how much effort it would take to start posting to it regularly again.

Maybe it's done the trick. There are new blog posts pressing at me now, wanting to get out. Maybe I will start blogging on a regular basis again.

The image above is a sunrise over Nanticoke on October 20, 2005. The original post can be found here.