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The picture at the top of the blog has such a unique meaning to me I use it as the background pic on my desktop. It startles me to encounter that image when the whole of my desktop is revealed. I've never used an image other than the default one that come with the Operating System.
These are the storms I think about when I think about dragons. These electrical storms are too organized toward a specific purpose to be thought of as random events. One of the most powerful storms I've encountered that have this shape and disposition was in the Florida Everglades.
I was driving back to Key West with my second wife through the sawgrass on both sides of State Highway 27 that runs from Gainesville to Homestead. There is a lotta open space on that route. Particularly after you pass the sugar cane fields around Lake Okeechobee:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Okeechobee
The geographic location is flat and flatter. Most of the vegetation is sawgrass and sugar cane with an occasion islet of trees interspersed among the taller palmettos. This sort of visual freedom in a subtropical zone makes for the electrical storms that are also called tropical storms. The Orientals call them "dragons", and I've learned to call them that too.
My wife and I saw this storm coming at us across the sawgrass of the Everglades, and it was one of the most spectacular events of nature I've ever witnessed. In the picture above you can see the circle of clouds swirling around an open center, but what can't be seen is that those clouds in real time are swirling ferociously and lifting water out of the everglades like a vacuum cleaner.
Not only are those rings of clouds moving swiftly in a circle, but they are roiling as if there is an unseen torus moving across the water, and everything that can be seen is a reaction to that invisible torus doing what torus' do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus
Admittedly, I haven't a leg to stand on when it comes to using an invisible torus as the ground of being of a specific form of a tropical storm, much less the dragon of Oriental literature and dancing. I might bet a small wager that I'm close to being right because of my history of having a reliable intuitive system. It ain't rare that I'm wrong either.
Storms shaped like this are somewhat common to sailors who spend a lotta time out on the oceans or large lakes. Sometime they'll drop funnels like tornadoes do and they're called water spouts. It's not unusual to see water spouts off the Florida Keys on occasion. Infrequently there might be three or four in the same area.
During my visit to Big Ben National Park in Texas I had two powerful experiences. One was that I left my body and went flying with a crow as it caught the uprising winds that strike the large hills that bend the Rio Grande River around them and serves as the namesake of the National Park.
The other experience was resting at the end of a fairly steep off-the-trail climb to a little nook away from the other tourists. It was in this nook that I had the encounter with the crow. On the other hand it was a great high place to see the surrounding country around sunset.
The sunset there had the effect of making the large, voluminous clouds appear purple, and from the vantage point of being on the top of the highest hills around, it was interesting to note that the bottom of these purple clouds was flat as a fly flitter, but the tops of the individual clouds rose in an anchor shape on end way up into the sky.
They were like huge water tankers carrying water from one place on Earth to another, and for some reason, it appeared to me to be deliberate. As if some sort of local intelligence inherent to each massive cloud was involved somehow in directing these water vapors to a specific targeted area.
Included in this dream sequence was the notion that what I was seeing floating along on a tiered, but flat invisible layer of air was the specific result of a single dragon that has sucked it up out of the Pacific Ocean and that the group of clouds I witnessed before me in that hill top were dragons flying in formation.
My memorized framework for providing order in nature comes from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Emperor's Yellow Book:
When all the lines are nines, it means:
There appears a flight of dragons with no heads.
Good fortune.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
