Before my mom’s death, we used to talk together every Sunday. Talking with her was like talking to  Pythia, the oracle of Delphi. My mom had experience that she was willing to share and all I had to do was listen and learn.

When I lost my mom, I lost my oracle and felt forced to search for a new mythology. While searching, I read Stephen Larsen’s The Mythic Imagination. The title intrigued me but the prose did not. I didn’t need to hear any more about Freud or Jung or Joseph Campbell or other people’s dreams. That’s when I asked myself: why not become a myth of my own?

What is a myth if not a narrative meant to explain thus help us better understand the world around us? What is a myth if not the story of a protagonist with a conflict to resolve? What is a myth if not learning to make the irrational rational?

All myths are personal in that we interpret them in our own way according to our own experiences, our own comprehension, our own perception.

The other morning I was sitting on the terrace with our cat. My eyes, as usual, travelled around the plants. The hibiscus up against a cloudless sky had me mesmerized. The pink flower on a cobalt blue background was so magnificent that it made me sigh. And sigh and sigh and sigh until there was this huge echo. A strange feeling came over me and, as if pulled by a magnet, I looked up and saw my mom’s face in the form of a cloud. There she was, center staged looking down on me smiling. I could feel her voice inside of me saying that there was no need for me to create a new mythology for the oracle lives within us all. And although I mourned her passing, I must remember that grief is a point of passage, not a place of arrival. That said, the cloud, my mom cloud, slowly drifted away.

For the new few days I reflected on this unique experience. I finally decided that my mom, my personal Pythia, was visiting me in the form of pareidolia and that maybe this was her new way of communicating with me. So I began carefully observing the clouds looking for messages. But, like a foreign language, you must first study the language before you can understand it.

In researching the language of clouds, I learned about Cloud Scrying aka nephelomancy. That is, the idea that clouds are oracles.

Although all clouds are made of the same thing (ice crystals or water droplets that float in the sky), no two clouds are the same. They are different in many ways such as shape, color, position, and direction. Some are thick, some are thin, some are wispy and some are bloated with rain. Some clouds have contours that are frayed and blurry while others have contours that are well-defined. And often clouds take on the shape of things that exist down on the ground and not in the sky.

Obviously if you want an answer from the clouds you must first have a question. But before asking it, it’s best to lay down while looking directly up at the sky, close your eyes, clear your thoughts, then open your eyes and start scanning the sky for an answer.

Here are a few of the answers I’ve been given:

Like my mom said, the oracle is within us all.

Related:   The Diary of Luz Corazzini  + Nephelomancy + Pythia +