As I looked at the clouds during my reading and contemplations this morning, I marveled at the way they studded together across the sky, tucking and wrapping themselves like giant white pillows, lilting gracefully into the morning sun.  It was an image of serenity, a vast, gentle serenity of space and time.



     And an image came into my mind:  Georgia O'Keeffe's "Clouds."  Long one of my favorite paintings (and Georgia O'Keeffe being one of my mother's favorite artists), "Clouds" captures us with its vision of expanse and eternity.  It speaks of endlessness and duration, a picture of existence without end.  A foreverness.  All said, it is a magnificent human creation.
     But how, I then asked myself, can we create, how can we, frail and fragile and once inert plasma and rock, be creators if we had not been created in turn?
     It's hard to create if a creation doesn't exist.