Toe in the Water

Cloud Bustin'

Cloud Bustin’

Back in the days of my youth, I had a hippy friend by the name of Garth. He lived in an apartment block with a balcony several floors up. This was an ideal place to catch some sun and chew the fat. We used it often.

My most memorable time on the balcony came when I found Garth there, stretched out on a lounge chair and watching the sky. He greeted me with the words, “Hey man, come do some cloud bustin’.”

In those days I would try anything once so I asked how this was done. Garth explained that the idea was to concentrate on just one area of an individual cloud and watch as the force of your attention dispersed it. Naturally, I tried it and it worked.

At first one could nibble away at the edge of a cloud or bust a hole in it. Then it was possible to switch to other parts of the cloud and so disperse it entirely in time. I know it sounds unlikely but you should try it before dismissing it as a hippy’s fanciful imagination. Heck, even I figured there must be some natural cause of this phenomenon and that clouds were always dispersing and reforming like this.

I couldn’t deny that it was fun, however. It didn’t seem to matter where you directed your attention in the cloud, that portion always started to disappear into thin air. And, if clouds did this naturally, surely we would notice them getting smaller all the time? I doubt that it did any harm to imagine we were causing the phenomenon, anyway. Garth reckoned it was the latent power of the mind that was shifting things around. Clouds are so ephemeral that it was easy even for untrained minds to affect them. Imagine, he proposed, if we could get control of such power.

Garth was always interested in such things, whereas I was already a bit concerned about the idiot things we humans did with some of the powers we had developed. We lost contact a few years later and, the last I heard was that he’d moved to Australia. Which is a pretty good place for finding errant clouds just asking to be picked on and busted.

As for myself, I still do a bit of cloud bustin’ when the opportunity presents itself. It’s a harmless pastime after all. But the really weird thing is that I’ve never seen a cloud grow - they only disperse. How come they can drift clear across a continent without disappearing altogether?


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