"All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds"

Everyone is pressed to carve a name into the granite of time, to leave something weighty, measurable, unmistakable. Choosing clouds as one’s place is a sly refusal of the monument. It favors the transient over the permanent, the sky’s drifting archive over bronze statues and bullet points in textbooks. Clouds are presence without possession; they cross borders without annexing them. To claim them is to choose a life that leaves changing shadows rather than chiselled certainties.

Clouds are also forms of unform, shape-shifters that hold nothing long enough to be trapped. They model a poetics of becoming: now a ship, now a mountain, now a blank. Such instability is not emptiness but possibility. From above, clouds witness the machinery of history with a soft, obstructing light; they interrupt the glare of certitude, filter the harshness, and sometimes burst into rain. Influence here is atmospheric: gentle, vast, sometimes stormy, always dependent on conditions larger than the self. There’s humility in that, but also reach.

A cloud’s work resembles the work of imagination. Vapor gathers, condenses into image, then disperses, returning to cycle again. Poems behave this way, brief, luminous concentrations that do not last but alter the air after they vanish. To dwell among clouds is to honor the provisional truth of language, to accept that meaning, like weather, shifts with the hour and the beholder. It is a vote for wonder over certainty, for looking up rather than looking back.

History craves records; clouds defy being kept. Their refusal to be archived can read as irresponsibility, or as mercy. Not everything must harden into a legacy. Some lives nourish fields, shade travelers, or darken into needed storms, then pass on. Choosing clouds suggests a faith that the lightest touch can still change the day, that significance may be real without being permanent, and that the truest place in time might be the one that keeps moving.