For the last few days the sky has been filled, scattered and strewn with clouds. It's mid-autumn and change is all around us. Inside I feel the urge to put on another warm layer, boil the kettle, light a fire, simmer soup, tuck hot water bottles into beds at night. Outside the leaves are yellowing, curling, falling. There are fewer flowers opening and the last of the summer vegetables ripening. Everything in me wants to slow down and slip all those seeds of hope and worry and springtime deep into the earth, wrap a wide shawl around my shoulders and wait, rest.  

Driving in the car, my eldest son tells me the names of the clouds. They roll off the tongue with slippery lightness: Stratus. Cirrus. Cumulus. Nimbus. We look for shapes above us - there's a ball of yarn, a fluffy pillow, a curving tail, a dinosaur, a steam train, a tadpole, a teapot.

The sky is mesmerising with her cloudy shapeshifters. Dawn and dusk sunbeams bounce through the tufts and swirls of moist air, illuminating their shadows with gold and pink, lighting up our faces. Summer clouds bring shady relief on a hot day, and if we're lucky - rain that will fall on parched soil and fill tanks and dams with water. Winter clouds can feel oppressively low, smothering, desaturating the sky of it's colour and warmth. Weeks of cloudy days seem to stretch on forever, obscuring joy and shrouding light. Clouds can bring us warning too, of storms approaching, of wild fires burning. Billowing, bursting, wafting, waning, rolling. Clouds are the waves of the troposphere.

I am drawn to the bible story of Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness. How God appears to them as a pillar of cloud in the day so that they might be hidden from hostile onlookers and shaded from the sun. There is also a sense that this divine cloud covering had purpose in stopping them from getting too far ahead of themselves. They could only see what was immediately in front of them. They had to trust, they had to wait. I can only imagine the combination of relief and frustration they would have felt. Relief to see and feel divine presence, to sense God being with them and around them, and yet the frustration to not have a more expansive view - to plot out more detailed plans and to feed the hopes and fears that come with them. In her book, All Shall Be Well, Catherine McNeil writes: "The trouble with cloudy pathways is that we don't want to wait. We want to plunge ahead, drive through, get to the end. We want to understand and grasp and move on... We don't like to hang suspended; we prefer to arrive. But if we can summon the courage to linger and look, mystery may captive us - and offer us exactly what we need."

I don't like hanging suspended. I am impatient to arrive where I feel I need or want to go. And yet, this past year has taught me much about waiting. About surrendering to the blurry-edged path ahead of me, to the mystery of not knowing. I remember being in the middle of our second state-wide lock down and feeling quite sad and helpless about it. I was sitting by the river as my boys explored the cold, rocky edges. I got out my journal and began sketching the clouds above me. As my pen sketched, my mind kept returning to the lines in Isaiah 44:22:

"I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud,
your sins are like the morning mist.
Return to me, for I have redeemed you" 

In medieval England, a curious spiritual book was written anonymously under the title "the Cloud of Unknowing". The author shares how postures of prayer and contemplation can help us grow our faith in God through a surrendering to the cloud of unknowing. That is, an active letting go and embracing of the spiritual reality of being known, loved and accompanied by God even though we can't see the whole picture of our lives - that there is beauty in the mystery and love of God. For to know God is to know love. As the anonymous author writes: “knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labour, but love, full of rest”.

I wonder what the sky is like where you are today. Is it clear and blue? Is it dark and star studded? Perhaps like me, yours is marbled with clouds. White clouds stretched out over the horizon and grey clouds threatening rain.

- Go for a walk on a cloudy day:
Notice the shape and textures of the clouds you see and what they make you think of. When you get home you might like to draw them on a piece of paper and note down the thoughts and concerns that are clouding your mind at the moment. Consider how the nature of clouds might relate to the season of life/work/faith you are in right now and how they can remind us to surrender to God, to wait with hopeful anticipation, to trust in love.

- Contemplate the Bible verse in Exodus 13:21: 
By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night.

and in Isaiah 44:22: 
I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud, your sins are like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you.

- Read a favourite poem of mine by Teilhard de Chardin and consider these musings of Henri Nouwen on waiting: 

"To wait with openness and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings. It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life. It is living with the conviction that God moulds us in love, holds us in tenderness, and moves us away from the sources of our fear... Our spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. This, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control."

. from the recipe book .

Pumpkin Risotto with Burnt Butter Sage

1 ripe, butternut, kent or japala pumpkin
1 brown onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup button mushrooms, finely sliced
6 whole garlic cloves
1/2 cup dry white wine or verjuice
2 cups aborio rice
1 litre of vegetable or chicken stock
3/4 cup of freshly grated parmesan
60g salted butter 
generous handful of sage leaves
slithered almonds, lightly toasted
salt and pepper + smoked paprika to taste 

Preheat oven to 200'c. Bake the pumpkin two ways: chop half the pumpkin into 1-2 inch cubes and toss in a pan with olive oil, pinch of sea salt and whole garlic cloves. Slice the other half into wafer thin semicircles/moons and place in separate pan lined with baking paper - drizzle with olive oil, salt and a tiny pinch of smoked paprika (if you like). Bake for 30-40 minutes - you can do this as you prepare the risotto or even hours in advance.

In a small saucepan bring stock to a simmer. Give the rice a good wash in lukewarm water and drain in a sieve. Meanwhile heat 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of olive oil into a large saucepan. Saute onion until golden and translucent. Add mushrooms and stir until soft. Add rice to pan and with wine or verjuice, and stir until liquid is absorbed. Add 1/2 cup of stock and stir until absorbed - continue to add stock and stir until the rice is al dente without letting it stick to the pan or burn (takes 20 minutes or so). Remove from the heat, cover with a lid and set aside.

In a small frying pan melt two tablespoons of butter and bring to the simmer - add a drop of verjuice or white wine and just before burning the butter turn the heat off and drop in sage leaves and swish them around the pan - they will change colour and turn a dark green but be careful not to let them go black - that will mean they are burnt completely and shouldn't be eaten.

Take roasted pumpkin from the oven and mix the roasted cubes of pumpkin and garlic cloves (skins off) into the risotto. Stir in parmesan.

Serve in bowls and top with crunchy roast pumpkin moons. Pour a little of the burnt butter and sage leaves on top. Finally garnish with toasted almonds if you wish and a sprinkle of smoked paprika.

Spiced Buckwheat Tea Cake with Honey Cream 
This recipe makes a mildly sweet tea cake - an everyday sort of cake you could have toasted for breakfast with butter or with a generous clump of freshly whipped cream in the afternoon. It is sweetened with honey and apples - a perfect treat for little ones. 

for the cake:
3/4 cup runny honey or maple syrup (or brown sugar)
1/2 cup un-sweeteneed applesauce
1/4 cup olive oil
2 eggs
1 cup of milk
2 tsp ginger
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves, nutmeg each
1/2 cup almond meal
1 1/4 cups cups buckwheat
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt

for serving:
1 cup pure cream
1 tablespoon honey

Preheat oven to 180'c. In a blender or mixer combine all the cake ingredients. Blend till smooth. Pour into a paper linen baking tin and bake for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool the cake and remove from the tin. Meanwhile whip pure cream until soft peaks form - fold in a tablespoon of runny honey or maple syrup and a drop of vanilla essence. Spoon onto cold cake and dust with ground cinnamon.

Honey Marshmallow Clouds
These homemade marshmallows are like eating soft honey-scented clouds. They are worth the effort and stickiness. You can substitute the honey with maple syrup or cane sugar.

3 tablespoons bovine gelatine, grass-fed if possible
1/2 cup water
1 cup runny honey
tapioca flour (for dusting)

Let the gelatine powder "bloom" with a 1/4 cup water in a large mixing bowl. Meanwhile bring honey and remaining 1/4 cup water to boil on a medium heat. pour hot honey liquid slowly into gelatine, beating on a medium speed with an electric mixer - continue to whip mixture until firm and glossy - around 10 minutes. Spread marshmallow into a paper lined dish and set in the fridge for a couple of hours. Using a sharp knife, cut marshmallow up into cubes and dust with tapioca flour (cornflour or icing sugar work well too). You could even dust them in toasted coconut. Store in an airtight container in the fridge.

 A message:
look above you 
white wafting 
clouds of 
ever-so-slightly 
blue and
grey haziness 
softly enfolding you,
permission to be
unknowable,
hidden from view. 

A covering:
muted murmuring 
we all need 
slow revealing,
quiet patterning -
or shelter from the heat
or rain forthcoming
or warning earth 
is burning.

A gathering:
of tears
forgotten things 
sticks and stones 
blood, bone, 
water from the sea
and air, sighs,
prayers lingering.

A blessing:
maybe, a kind of 
blurry-edged 
respite, 
fear diffusing,
a shroud for 
doubts and longings,
transgressions 
like a cloud
blotted out and 
​scattered in the wind.