Yesterday evening in Mooresville . . .

I just love cloud watching,

ever changing, always captivating.

This is the same photo with a vignette . . .

much more dramatic . . .

Food for thought from "Time and the Art of Living" by Robert Grudin,

chapters 5 and 6:

V.4  Generally, experience is analyzed in either of two ways:

mechanistically (in terms of cause and effect) or teleologically

(in terms of goal or purpose).

V.7  As events pass into history, they settle into themselves and
compose themselves in a smaller context.

V.9  While daily journalism proliferates itself by exaggerating emergencies

and ignoring continuity, weekly journalism perverts continuity by
fabricating the illusion of grand historical shape and movement.

V.12  . . . for in a way that few moderns seem to understand,

the mind is as limited by what it rebels against as it is by what it accepts.

V.16  Written history is composed of actions;  real history is actions

compounded invisibly with refusals to act.

V.18  Patriotism . . . is a love of land, speech and culture so inexpressibly

basic that it may be seen as an extension of instinctive self-love.

Patriotism . . . is at heart one of the few truly unifying forces of

civilization and one of the few links we adults have with the natural world
and the [pure] affections of children.

V.22  One cannot plan to be lucky; but sensible planning and action

make one accessible to luck.

VI.2  An axiom which seems implicit in almost every traditional moral code

is that every action has a consequence.  A second axiom, more

debatable but nonetheless intrinsic to this study, is that action is continuous.
Action, in other words, includes what we commonly call inaction; and
consequence springs as much from our refusal to act as from our willed
deeds themselves.  This is nowhere as apparent as in our personal
relationships.  We lose what is valuable in these – love, joy, communality –
less through conflict and tragedy than through long series of shadowy
and often unconscious refusals.  Withdrawing, forgetting, falling out of touch,
ignoring or avoiding . . . destroy more relationships than death or anger
and tend to isolate their perpetrators.