who let the genie

who let the genie

out of the kalash

on top of the golden dome?

The sun is starting to set as I come out of the golden dome after group meditation. Something makes me turn around and this is exactly what I see, a genie emerging from the kalash on top of the dome. No one else seems to notice it, so I take a photo as proof that I'm not just seeing things (no photoshop here). If it's a cloud, it's not in my Cloud Collector's Handbook, so I've added a new category to my list, genieus. Sounds a lot like genius, right? Well, the word genie actually does derive from genius, which originally meant a guardian spirit assigned to an individual at birth. Now we think of a genius as someone who is living their full potential, which is what we're aspiring to become as we meditate together for hours in the golden dome. So I'm wondering, whose genie is this?

above the golden

above the golden

leaves of the piebald sycamore,

cloud stairs leading up

Shinny up the brown 
trunk of the sycamore. 
Climb from white 
limb to white limb 
through golden leaves. 
At the top, step onto soft 
white cloud stairs. 
Ascend into azure sky.

the setting sun paints

the setting sun paints

the gray canvas of clouds pink

blue orange purple gold

It all happens so quickly. The sun sinking toward the horizon casts oblique beams onto the gray cloud streamers, lighting up the pixels of water droplets in a magnificent display of flaming colors. In a few minutes the burning orb dips below the line of vision, the curtain of darkness drops and the show is over.

crowned with cumulus

crowned with cumulus

clouds Amantani rises

above the deep lake

Amantani Island looks small beneath the towering cumulus clouds and the vast expanse of Lake Titicaca. Small it may be in diameter, 9.82 km (6.1 miles), but its highest peak, Pachatata, is 300 m (984 feet) high. Lake Titicaca at its deepest is 135 m (443 feet deep), so the entire volcanic land mass rising from the bottom of the lake could be as high as 435 m (1,427 feet), and its highest peak stands at 4,050 m (13,287 feet). With no motor vehicles on the island and only a little electricity from solar panels, the population of about 800 families live by manual labor, tilling small plots of wheat, potatoes and quinoa, tending alpaca and sheep, fishing, gathering medicinal plants, carting rocks for a paved walkway up the steep slopes, spinning and weaving and knitting. It's a quiet life and the people seem content with their ancient ways, a rare sight in this modern world. 

curving copper clouds

curving copper clouds

stretch probing fingers over

dark mountains and lake

At sunset the clouds look like copper fingers stretching north over Lake Pukaki, a long finger lake that runs north-south between the Southern Alps in New Zealand.