I took this photo in Capetown many years ago. It wasn’t my intention to take a photo of a seagull, but, somehow the bird’s presence adds to the image, rather than taking anything anyway.
What I was wanting to photograph was this very common phenomenon which the locals refer to as “The table cloth”. It’s when white clouds form on top of Table Mountain and steadily spill over the edge to tumble down the cliff face.
They don’t tumble that far before disappearing. It’s mesmerising. I watched it for ages. It seemed like there was an endless supply of white cloud on the mountain top. No matter how much spilled over, there never seemed any less on top. It’s a constantly moving phenomenon. The cloud tumbling over the edge is continuous. At the very top it looks like a waterfall, but, as you can see, it’s a waterfall which completely disappears within the first few metres of its descent.
Where does it go?
As you stand and look at it, you are watching the visible become invisible. Right before your very eyes.
Isn’t it amazing that all that water which creates the white cloud is already present in the air, but invisibly so, and it all just vanishes back into its natural invisibility as you watch it.
I know I often think of the relationship between a wave and the ocean when I think of our individual existences…..how we emerge from the ocean, the way an identifiable wave emerges, without ever leaving the environment in which it exists.
This “table cloth” phenomenon is like another example. The water exists in the air, then it coalesces to from clouds like these, before slipping back into the invisibility of the air.
Each of us, in our short, transient lives, is fashioned out of all that exists, appearing briefly in our distinct, unique form, before slipping back into the continuity of Existence.
As the physicist, Carlo Rovelli, wrote…
A handful of elementary particles which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space even when it seems that there is nothing there combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies of the innumerable stars of sunlight of mountains woods and fields of grain of the smiling faces of the young at parties and of the night sky studded with stars.
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