“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
~ Cesare Pavese

The flight from Madison to New York City was a window view of ceaseless change.

It made me realize how little I know about the clouds I look at nearly every day, and discover that I wanted to learn about clouds. I couldn’t even recall the name for the study of clouds.

Nephology is the study of clouds, a subset of meteorology.

Nephology? No wonder I couldn’t recall it, I don’t think I have ever known that -ology. And cloud naming appears to be a mix and match affair, one that requires more than looking at a few photos to get an identification.

So for now, I’ll just go with:

Enjoy all the pretty clouds from the airplane window!

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”  ~ Pat Conroy

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”  ~ Leonardo da Vinci

“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown…”
~ Paul Theroux from The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”   ~ Khalil Gibran from The Prophet

“I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you’re going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.”  ~ C. JoyBell C.

“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
~ Christopher McCandless

“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”  ~ Wendell Berry from A Place on Earth