The Goddess is an artist, and the canvas She paints on is the sky… and all else in the created universe.
But I notice the sky much more frequently than I notice her other creative fields, such as the life within the soil or the currents deep within, and even under, the ocean. In New Mexico we are blessed with sunny skies, or sunny skies framing some clouds, ~310 days of the year.
I am in awe, when I see the infinite skill and diversity of her cloud paintings. I was taught as child that there are three major types of clouds: cirrus, stratus, and cumulus… and perhaps a few combinations or variants, such as cumulonimbus clouds.
I smile when I think of such absurd simplification.
The vast New Mexico sky, like so much of our expansive state, does not encourage simplification, labels, or limits. She can create clouds that are the puffy cumulus ubiquitous in children’s art, and she can create wispy cirrus mares’ tails, or layered stratus offerings. But she creates clouds that are huge discs like extraterrestrial motherships, and like calligraphy in an unknown tongue, and in herringbone patterns or waffle-weaves.
She creates cloudscapes in radiant white and silver-gray and slate blue and near-black, and she establishes sunrises and sunsets in a glory of orange and rose, purple and violet, azure and gold, and on and on.
We have all seen the creatures that she paints up there: reaching dragons and rising phoenixes, dogs and cows and mice, dolphins arching high in the tenuous water vapor up there, lions and tigers and barracudas, oh my.
I have seen serried ranks of cris-crossed clouds, rows of puffy dots like a celestial field of cotton, and dark shadow-craft sailing on seas of ivory and gold. And I have seen cloud patterns that I can barely begin to describe: curves and lines, smudges and shapes that seem planned or inspired, that are filled with intention and meaning that I cannot begin to divine.
Some might say that this is all happenstance, a chance combination of light, water vapor, and air currents. No. This is Art, and a message to all of us that I cannot read but often feel: a message of hope and glory, exuberance and joy, and yes, love.
— Amber K
