Remember lying on your back, looking up at clouds? I still love doing it, but this time, I did it on an airplane. Clouds still fascinate me. They can look like plowed fields, like a wall, like a ghost. They leave shadows and they light up with the sun. Here are some photos from my trip to Phoenix.
These are the furrowed clouds on the way to Chicago. If you look closer to the horizon, you can see the shadow of thin clouds–a cold front–racing by.
The plane banked, and I noticed that the horizon was curved. At 39,000 feet, you can see the curvature of the earth.
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On the right are two different kind of clouds. The ones in the front, with shadows, are lower and carry rain. Whether or not it rains is dependent on the clouds in the back, higher in the sky, and pushing the line of a cool front across the sky. The tapestry of the landscape is beautiful, with smooth earth neutrals that still provide a lot of contrast and texture.
This one is an amazing snapshot of the West with a different kind of cloud–haze mixed with high, thin clouds. The high clouds were above the airplane, and we were flying at 39,000 feet. This picture, on the edge of the mountains that create the Grand Canyon, is a picture we don’t often see–a mountain rising up out of the middle picture without the normal view of “sun from the top.” At first glance, with the odd sun angle (taken from an airplane), it could just as well be a canyon instead of a mountain.
–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach, who believes nature has a lot to teach people, if we’d pay attention. (c) 2007. All rights reserved. Images: Quinn McDonald.
