I watched this cloud the other night. I stared at it for quite a while and wish I could have done it for a while more. It was maybe the most perfect cloud I ever saw, though I mean perfect in all the imperfect ways.

It wasn't a particularly noticeable cloud, by any of our beauty standards. It wasn't symmetrical, it wasn't overly thin or overly tall, it wasn't just the right color, it didn't have a strong consistency. I'm not even sure you could call it a cloud. It was more like a collection of teardrop communities, floating together in the sky like crowds at a music festival, carried by the sounds of the wind, the chaotic algorithms and mathematics of the atmosphere putting on a show.

Photo by Maria Sprow/ Copyright Artinistic

But this cloud, it had a soul. You could see it, right there in front of you, changing and growing and becoming and transforming, but still this one soul with a million pieces, existing. Watching. Being.

Now, I've seen a lot of clouds in my day. I've always taken the time to notice the clouds, especially at night, when they glow against the darkness. When I go outside at night, I look up. I can't help it and don't want to stop it. It keeps me balanced, reminds me that there's an axis, shows me that there's just so much blink-and-you'll-miss-it, once-in-a-lifetime beauty right there for the taking. No two cloudy skies, no two sunsets, no two sunrises, no two seconds, will ever be exactly the same.

But this cloud, it was special. It lived. A full life, right then and there, before my eyes. It was created, it transformed and then it dissipated.

It was a shapeshifter. A creature from another world, a magical beast. It started off with two ears, a nose, an eye: A goat before it grew to become a cow that became a fish feeding on algae that became a giant sea turtle carrying a home on its back that became a sailboat riding the rough ocean seas that became a whale that became a hot air balloon flying through the sky.

This cloud: It was always something, and it was always something different. It was all those things at one time and all those things in time and all those things one at a time. It was a definition of infinity, an artistic expression, a hundred different stories. It was what every other cloud wants to be: not a perspiration, but an inspiration.

It nearly kills me that I don't have a timelapse of it to watch over and over and over again. All I have is my memory of it - though my memory does tend to make things better and better. It might be a problem.

Look up as often as you can. You never know what you’ll see.