Sure enough, a few minutes into the watching, I saw a shooting star. Then Art saw one. Then I saw another and Art saw two more. But after that – nothing! We started to get anxious as these really weird clouds started rolling in. We lamented; "Oh great! We won't get to see the meteor showers because it's getting so cloudy. We might as well go in." We started gathering up our stuff and began to head for the house.
As we walked toward the door, we kept looking up, trying to catch one or two more falling stars before calling it a night. But as we gazed up at the sky we both began to realize that even though the clouds weren’t why we were out there, they actually looked quite amazing!
We decided to go back, sit down, relax, and watched these cotton candy clouds stretch over the expanse of the night sky. They were a thin mesh and you could still kind of see the stars through them as they brightened the sky. Kind of like the opposite of a shadow. Their configurations were joyfully amusing and silently awe inspiring.
Because we were so focused on what we were expecting to see, we both realized that we had almost missed out on something quite alarmingly beautiful. We could have easily meandered back into the house, disappointed that the clouds rolled in keeping us from seeing the meteor showers, and sadly crawled into bed, bereft about what we might’ve seen. But then we would have missed the suspended constellations of water crystals floating quietly overhead, stretching in and out of whimsy and abstraction. Never to be seen again!
