The hills are alive with the sound of music,
With songs they have sung for a thousand years.
The hills fill my heart with the sound of music;
My heart wants to sing ev’ry song it hears.
My heart wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees;
My heart wants to sigh like a chime that flies from a church on a breeze,
To laugh like a brook when it trips and falls over stones on its way,
To sing through the night like a lark that is learning to pray.
I go to the hills when my heart is lonely;
I know I will hear what I’ve heard before.
My heart will be blessed by the sound of music,
And I’ll sing once more.
Rogers & Hammerstein
For years I’ve thought that I could easily sing those words as my own. My hills, though, are made of water, not stone and they constantly change and dance before my eyes, creating a sort of music very different from the song above. And they’re hills that have circulated for not a thousand, but many thousands of years. Ever since the flood. Think about it for a minute: every time you gaze at a cloud, you’re looking at a cycle that has repeated countless times since the flood. Every time you take a drink of water, you’re drinking something that came down upon the earth as floodwaters. The same for the water that composes a huge amount of our bodies. Staggers the imagination.
Thursday, July 30th, my best friend, Elisha, stopped in the middle of a busy day to gaze in rapture at the sky, and take pictures with her new camera. Last night she sent some of them to me.
I can quite imagine the delight she felt when the saw the shifting light and shadow. It’s something that consistently holds me in its grasp every time I look to heaven.
This picture is a good illustration of why I insist the mountains in Texas are skybound. Look at the cliffs and ridges of this set!
This is perhaps the most dramatic. This is taken from a location just south of Bonham, Texas, in one of the nicest areas outside the DFW metroplex.
What amused me is that on the same day - and probably around the same time too - I was photographing clouds as well. Thanks to the El Nino, we’ve been having unusual amounts of rain - and shockingly cool weather. Thus the beautiful cloudscapes in the afternoon. Mom and Dad were out at the store, and they called home to tell me to take some pictures. Guess they know me a bit too well. 
The sky was unusual. The picture above is looking northwest - this one is looking directly west. There were these huge cotton-candy cumulus clouds everywhere (stable cumulus; none of them were swelling) and above them were delicate layers of cirrus. Cirrus clouds have this uncanny way of catching light and holding it, so everything was really, really bright.
Very bright indeed.
Here the cirrus curtain is highly visible.
There were a few contrails too.
Looking more east. With the sun at my back, the clouds appeared less glossy and more natural, turning from layers of silk to tufts of cotton.
Definitely tufts of cotton.
This one was slightly bigger. Nothing coming from the northwest (the direction the wind was blowing) seemed to be anywhere near this size.
This is about as classic as it gets.
Of course, I wanted to try a few B&Ws too, so here are a few experiments.
Click below to enlarge.
