Watching the Clouds Move
In 1999 I was looking for a new place to live. My old home of Columbia, South Carolina was where I went to college. I was working at South Carolina Educational Television, (SCETV for short) and feeling like I was beginning to exhaust all that Columbia South Carolina could offer me professionally. Socially I’d never been happier, as through my college years, I was able to shed my former identity of sad sack loner to someone who had a family of friends to hang with. We had so many social occasions, it didn’t matter that I was what I would describe now as ‘terminally single.’
In choosing a new place to live, I identified New York City, and Atlanta as potential cities to live in. Then one night late, I got a call from my friend Laura raving about a place called Portland , OR and how amazing it was. “You can start all over again here,” she said, “in a good way.”
I booked a flight for a future flight to Portland. After deciding after spending 10 days in New York City that there was no way I would be able to find a place to live let alone a job, and realizing that Atlanta wasn’t different enough from Columbia. I boarded a flight to Portland, OR .
The clouds was the first thing I noticed about the city. The slow moving cloud cover that could be seen as some sort of doom laden comforter followed me wherever I went.
I have a memory of lying down on the grass, and I was so tired from the East Coast jet lag, and the beer, Obsidian Stout, my favorite and when I looked up I saw the slow moving clouds. They were moving while I stayed still.
All my life I lived in places where the clouds were still, I got this vertigo like feeling in me, a walking dizzy sick that was didn’t go away until I was back in Columbia. But those moving clouds stuck with me.
Change, I thought, the clouds are my change, here things move forward, it’s not stuck in the past. Recently there had been a vote to take down the Confederate Flag from the Statehouse, where I worked as a part of SCETV. The vote failed in a spectacular fashion. That was my cue to step away.
The still clouds back east had everything to do with where I was at in my life. It was fun, and my social calendar was filled with canoeing and seeing bands, but those clouds weren’t moving forward, they were static.
Laura showed me the whole city and after only a couple of days I was intent on moving there. I liked it so much I put a deposit down on a two bedroom apartment.
Coming back to Columbia, I had a mission, I had a plan, me and a new friend I met would drive cross country, from Columbia, SC to the place where the clouds were as forward moving as I wanted to be. I wanted change faster than I could actually handle change, as evidenced by my sadness once I actually moved to Portland. My car got broken into almost as soon as I arrived, and a few weeks later I was working weird temp jobs for money. I worked at a cardboard sign factory, made coffee for lawyers, and lugged crates on trucks for homegrocer.com.
My homesickness for my old life was intense. My buddy who I drove out with fell out almost immediately after we arrived. Oregon Public Broadcasting, where I thought I would be hired right away didn’t even contact me for an interview for a TV production job I had experience doing at SCETV.
Too much change, too fast.
I found myself, but it took time. I found a job, doing Photoshop and Flash, got laid off about a year later. Found a new job doing Tech Support, they closed the call center one day when I had a bad sore throat. I did a good hard think.
Went back to school, to be an English teacher. I met my wife while I was student. I got a teaching job where I still teach at now after finishing a masters in Education. I got married, had two beautiful girls.
Last week it was a sunny day. I walked fast, getting my steps in, making photographs along the way. I look for strange arrangements, juxtapositions, small to big dull to bright, I love windows, portals, reflections.
Then a window reflecting clouds. I take this picture.
Ok, I edited this photo to enhance the emotions, but the window drew me in. Framed by the window, the clouds were moving, quite slow, at a similar speed to the way they did that afternoon lying on the grass at the house Laura lived on SE Ivon. Then, and now came together in a way that compressed time into a single moment of push and pull.
Standing there, on Alberta Street, with people filing past me, the last of the sun fading into the usual wall of gray. I switched my phone to Video. I stood there for as long as I could without getting in people’s way. Nine seconds to be exact.
That movement, that moment in time when I had a choice, to stay in static confederate flag land or move to a new place, a new series of risks, to risk it all on growth. And standing there last Saturday, with the clouds moving slow as you please, I felt a hint of warm in my solar plexus. I was home.
Here’s to movement, here’s to change. Here’s to you standing still while the rest of thee world moves on. I am pleased where I am at the moment, things are not perfect, but I am steady and stable enough not to get caught in the undertow, and can watch, with stillness, as the world morphs and changes, often in terrifying ways.