Cloud Photographs as Meditative Tools
It was Bernie Nelson who first detected – in a book review – that I use clouds as a meditative tool. Bernie has just passed away; I will miss his perceptive ability to tie together the clouds and my text on consciousness. But people have long, in fact probably since there were humans, been staring at the clouds and feeling their mood change, feeling themselves a part of nature; seeing faces, images, Some say that a great guru can project images into the clouds. Just look at the photos and see if this change of mood happens to you. I found that even alone in my bed, flipping through a booklet of 4 x 6 photographs, I would suddenly find a meditative mood sink over me and images spring to life. After I’d just left a Taos Native American Easter ceremony near Santa Fe, the camera seemed to catch forms made out of feathers. Other times it was animal faces. As we will also see below, artists sometimes speculated on where the forms came from, how they reached our minds. Or did they start there?
The images are part of a large portfolio that I collected while living in Belgium in the 1990s – photographing with film – about four rolls a day. Back in the U.S., I had them scanned and then in the case of negatives worked on the scans in Photoshop to bring out the original print colors. When a negative of the sky is scanned, there are no fixed colors. In fact, the colors might become gray. At first I tried to re-create in Photoshop the exact coloring of the 4 x 6 film printouts. That proved almost impossible. So I got fascinated with discovering what colors were hidden in the images. Since I experimented with sunlight; the images are in essence light, pieces of sunlight, prana or photons that were fascinating to play with. Even to enlarge the photographs on the computer, what I would see was dazzling pixels of blazing light.
