Cloudy With a Chance of Joy

by klstirr

We have been pretty excited about clouds ever since we began plotting our cloud demo several years ago, but our energy around clouds has been supercharged by Gavin Pretor-Pinney and his Cloud Appreciation Society. One of my favorite quotes from his TED talk posted above echoes something that is one of my goals for visitors (and for myself) in many of our demos and interactions at the Exploratorium: as Gavin says, “You don’t need to rush off away from the familiar, across the world, to be surprised—you just need to step outside, pay attention to whats so commonplace, so everyday, so mundane, that everybody else misses it.”

His talk, and the Cloud Appreciation Society as a whole, remind us that we are not separate from our atmosphere—”we don’t live beneath the sky, we live within it,” and that “cloudspotting legitimizes doing nothing…and reminds us that just being here and letting your imagination lift from the concerns…of just being in the present is good for you—its good for the way you feel, its good for your ideas, its good for your creativity, [and] its good for your soul.”

So, look up at the clouds & find joy in being here in the world!