‘Not unlike a short meditation’: the benefit of keeping your eyes on the sky

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a … stratocumulus. Cloud, that is. If you don’t know your stratocumulus (low-hanging, lumpy clouds that go from white to dark grey) from your cirrocumulus (lots of small, white, rounded puffs floating high in the sky), it’s a safe bet you’re not a cloud-spotter and you don’t work for the Bureau of Metereology.

Cloud-spotting, like the slow-food and digital-detox movements, is all about taking the time, even if it’s on your way to work, to look up at the sky and appreciate the power of the natural world. Since Gavin Pretor-Pinney founded the Cloud Appreciation Society in England in 2005, his group of sky-watchers has amassed tens of thousands of members in 120 countries worldwide. He argued in a 2013 TED talk that the beauty of clouds is often missed because they are “so commonplace and omnipresent”, going on to describe them as “nature’s poetry”.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney founded the Cloud Appreciation Society in England in 2005. Since then his group has amassed hundreds of thousands of members across the globe.

Sydney writer and publicist Kym Druitt has long been beguiled by the beauty of clouds, but only stumbled across the Cloud Appreciation Society eight years ago when she picked up a copy of Pretor-Pinney’s book, A Pig with Six Legs and Other Clouds, in a Salvation Army shop in Sydney’s Surry Hills. “I found the book – and the idea of belonging to the society – so charming,” says the 61-year-old.

Kym Druitt describes cloud-spotting as “not unlike a short meditation”.Credit:Louie Douvis

Cloud spotter Kym Druitt took this photo of an unusual convection cloud from her aircraft window on a recent trip.

“It really encourages you to get outside, to enjoy nature – it’s not unlike a short meditation. And being able to name those clouds appeals to the citizen scientist in me.” (Yes, in case you’re wondering, there is an app, called Cloud-a-Day, which helps people learn to identify the different formations – a handy little tool, given that clouds are so dynamic.)

Druitt is just off a plane (“I always get a window seat”) from a trip to the Arctic, organised by the Cloud Appreciation Society, to view the aurora borealis or northern lights. “It’s such a phenomenal, arresting image, that milky twirling and rippling in the sky,” she says. Even from her hotel room in the town of Tromso in Norway, Druitt watched mesmerised as the lights billowed outside her window. She rushed outside to see others staring up at the sky. “I was just shaking – it was so exciting.”

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