Clearing the Air

"Cindy's Afternoon Storm" by D. J. Tankersley

If you have ever taken a drive through the desert after a rainstorm you will usually notice that the air has a unique sharpness and clarity to it, you can see things way off in the distance that are usually a bit blurred but now seem sharp and clear, you can see things you could not see before and it is almost as though you were looking though some kind of magical spyglass.
This phenomenon can occasionally be seen in places other than the desert and sometimes, but rarely, this occurs without a storm preceding it.   I once saw the same thing while driving south on pacific coast highway near Santa Monica, California when Catalina Island was so clear you could almost see the birds in the trees, but there is nothing like the clarity and sharpness that can be seen in the desert after a storm when forever is seen on the far horizon.

 Life also has it's own atmosphere and usually we go though it like we view the scenery on a ride though the desert on a normal day, everything seems clear enough even on the horizon, we see where we are going and what direction we are heading in - everything is as it always is -  until the atmosphere or air changes changing the way you look at things, changing your perspective and suddenly things may not be what you thought they were. When the air is cleared of  the many different substances that cloud the clarity of the air such as dust, smog, fog and humidity just right conditions are created for perfect clarity and the same I think will hold true with life, when you are able to remove the negative things (vanity, greed, jealousy and such) from the atmosphere of your life you are able to get a clearer view of  the landscape of your life.  It often takes a storm to clear the air of pollutants and it is so true that it will often take a storm in our lives to clear the air of our lives.  Storms, while usually unpleasant and sometimes dangerous, even catastrophic can often provide the change in the air that is necessary to clear the air.  The atmosphere of our life is dynamic, always changing, sometimes like a sudden storm other times so slow we might not even notice, but like the air around our planet it will always be changing and while the heavens guide us, we do have some control over our lives and the atmosphere we choose to live in. Perhaps if we learn to keep the hate, ego ,vanity and other negative things out of the air of our lives as much as we can we will perhaps have a clearer, less stormy life.  

What do you think?  How do you keep the air of you life clear?  Have you ever seen the air where it was so clear it was like a magnifying glass?

Here are some cool links:
Clear Air Pictures
Atoptics
Shooting43
Sky at Night Magazine