Like Clouds
a short poem on motion, love, and impermanence
I like to watch the clouds drift by
over the water
a place that feels like home
still here
still there
maybe the in-between,
where love brushes against loss,
is where we stay awhile
a narrow place
where blue meets blue
and nothing asks to be kept
like clouds passing through,
the turning happens inward
subtle,
unmarked
motion without destination
affection without return
and like the clouds,
and like love,
it isn’t where it ends
that matters
only that it moved
Thanks for being here.
Until next time,
j
‘motion without destination
affection without return’
the timing feels right on reading this one.
When it rains, the clouds pour out 🌧️🩵
We live in an ocean of time, where events, things, and people are continually succeeding one another, but we cannot live with such boundless complexity, because we disappear in it, and therefore we organize it into categories, sequences, hierarchies. We organize ourselves-I am not nameless, my name is such and such, my parents were like this and that, I went to school in such and such a place, I experienced this and that, by character I am like this and like that, and that has caused me to choose this and that. And we organize our surroundings we don't just live on a plain with some grass, bushes, roads, and houses, we live in a particular place in a particular country with a particular culture, and we belong to a particular stratum within that culture.
All of us sum up our lives in this way, that is what we call identity; and we sum up the world we inhabit in similar ways, that is what is called culture. What we are saying about ourselves fits, but no more than if we had said something entirely different, thought something entirely different about ourselves and our place in the world—if, for example, we had lived during the Middle Ages and not in the early twenty-first century—and it too would have fit and seemed meaningful.
That identity and our understanding of the world at one and the same time fit yet are arbitrary is, I think, the reason why art and literature exist. Art and literature constitute a continual negotiation with reality, they represent an exchange between identity and culture and the material,
physical, and endlessly complex world they arise from. - Karl Ove Knausgaard, Inadvertent