Why I chase clouds

My handle is rosechasingclouds, and people sometimes ask about it. The honest answer is that it started as a joke about the Irish weather. If you live here, the sky is the main event: it changes every twenty minutes, it ruins your plans, and then, just when you've given up on it, it does something so beautiful you have to stop walking.

Somewhere along the way the joke became the whole point. I started going up hills on purpose — Bray Head first, then anywhere with a bench and a view. I wrote this after one of those walks, and I still stand by it:

"The first hike felt like a question mark — why walk so far, so high, so tired? Now it feels like an answer I keep returning to."

The thing about clouds is that you can't schedule them. You can only be outside often enough that eventually you're there when the sky decides to show off. That's the closest thing I have to a philosophy: be outside often enough.

So that's what this journal will mostly be — skies I caught, benches I sat on, and the occasional 99 with a flake in it, eaten on a stony beach at the bottom of a cliff walk. If you see a good cloud, you know where to send it.