It wasn’t the clouds that had him worried. Storms come and go. After all, you can always run for shelter from an oncoming storm. Usually you get there before the rain begins to fall. Sometimes you don’t, but that is the joy of life. No, what had him worried was where it all began. How the storm had formed off in some distant land. He imagined that day when a bit of water vapor congealed into a single white puff, a cloud so small that it offered no protection to beach goers below as they laid out under a laser sharp, yellow sun. How simple it would have been then for a small airplane or jet to fly through that tiny bit of cloud and scatter the vapor once again rendering it harmless. “If you knew a killer storm would come of a tiny cloud,” he wondered, “would you not destroy it?”

Each day on the equatorial line the sun draws water into the sky. Clouds form quickly into steep pillars that reach high into the blue until their tops are sheared off by upper level winds. The pillars dance around like tops, some faster, some slower. Some merge together and turn thick and black. Little storms are unleashed. Often as quickly as they are formed, they release their energy and evaporate into blue skies again. If not for the wet ground and the few broken leaves on a palm, you’d have never guessed that a short time before the sky had been opaque and threatening. Of course this is the nature of storms. They never last. The sky turns blue once again while the humans below are left to clean up the damage.

Lying in the cool, wet grass his mind returned to the coming clouds. “A storm cannot be helped.” he thought. The responsibility for the storm lies with it’s creator. What truly had him worried was his own perception. He had missed something. He was too busy daydreaming, staring at the clouds.

There was a silent streak of white in the distance as the rain began to fall.