Head in the Cloud
The phrase “head in the clouds” used to carry a sweet, accommodating sentiment. It referred to the dreamers — important people in society who, in their own way, tinker on the fringes and often supply vital creative novelty that can benefit us all. Even though they can provide random value, they are mostly critiqued for not having their feet on the ground and are labelled as somewhat naïve.
But I want to offer a twist on that idea.
These days, it seems we all rather have our heads in the Cloud, which carries a completely different meaning. We seem severed at the neck from the awareness of our natural interconnectedness — that quiet intelligence dreamers still make use of. Ironically, this means we no longer have our feet on the ground — even though we are constantly told that is the most valid way to be in our ever more ‘realistic’ times.
We no longer dream in that gentle, imaginative way the original phrase captured. Instead, we are suspended — disconnected from the blood-flow that once linked our feet to our head, and the earth to the sky. A circulation of richness that made us healthy, whole, fluid and wise. In an ideal world, we would be grounded and flying, walking on terra firma and dreaming.
When the blood of wholeness and integration does not flow in the right way, we get the world we now have.
But this world is not a mistake. It is by design. And we must participate fully in that design in order to perfect it — as ourselves.
We must participate in our own fabrication and make the necessary adjustments to correct the design flaws. Not continue to attempt (mostly half-heartedly) to return to some ideal past, but to enter a new sphere — an update to the noösphere — as Teilhard de Chardin meant when he pointed to the emergence of a collective presence.
The noösphere is not the sum of a number of separate individuals in dialogue, each disconnected from the other but reaching across the divide. It is the sum total of the true human.
A phrase I’ve used before — and one that perhaps offers another interpretation of the noösphere — is the Human Event.
I offer this because we are not merely a human being. We are an unfolding. A movement in time. An event.
Time gets a bad rap — especially when experienced through the looped, fragmented lens of the individuated self. It becomes a tyranny of busyness. We never seem to have enough time in this framing. We are always running to catch up, yet we never quite seem to make it to where we are running. Then we need a break to recover — before returning to the fray, in a relentless cycle of exhaustion.
Something is obviously wrong with this whole picture.
We invented this version of time. We constructed it during the Industrial Revolution to organise our days, to manage people and coordinate tasks. It was a tool — fabricated for the purpose of efficiency.
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But the Human Event honours the opportunity of time differently. Not just time as a schedule, but time as being. As the controversial Heidegger suggested — we are beings in time. Still, as meaningful as this orientation is, I would go much further.
I see that it is now time to let go of being itself, because we have injected far too much into self-reference. This referencing has served its purpose — as a necessary construct of identity produced by evolution — so we could arrive here. And be here. Now.
But “be here now” is not the endgame. It is the doorway. It is not the goal, but the escape route — from the misunderstood necessity of individuated selfhood and the tyranny of linear time.
Once we are fully here, now — we can jump into Time. The living dimension of time. The place where everything is done, where everything emerges, flowers, and returns to its source.
We can know this as ourselves. We come from the very source that gives origin to time. The origin of time is the origin of ourselves. And that origin is revealed through the gift of attention.
Attention is the Absolute in time.
It is the nothingness from which everything arises. In time, it is the creative action of attention.
But when our heads are in the Cloud — severed from the body — we see nothing but our own blindness. We live in ignorance. We generate storms of futility and more ignorance.
The purpose of the Cloud is to help us conceal ourselves from our own blindness. The Cloud cloaks and deceives. It has no real purpose or meaning in the larger scheme of things, except futile recursiveness.
But the good news is — futility is unsustainable. And, if we are fortunate, we will learn from this — as some of us always do. In learning from our own futility, wisdom is born.
Then, maybe, we will stop our futile activities — those that merely express the gamut of what’s possible, without discernment. Activities permitted by the sheer generosity of God, who gave us the ability to do anything at all that we fancy, misguided or not.
And we just do it all. All possibilities are blindly pursued. This is what time is for — until we run into the end of futile cul-de-sacs.
Futility, too, has a purpose — so that we can come to its end.
So perhaps now we can take our heads out of the Cloud.
Place our feet back on the ground.
And enter the sky.
The clear sky.
In the clear sky, we can look around.
We see.
We see everyone.
We see ourselves in the other.
We dream again.
We hope.
We breathe.
We fly.
And we walk, on solid ground.
