I've spent many hours thinking about the belly of our planet. 

We pull things from her - oil, gas, coal. We dig deeper and deeper for more. We want nothing more than to reach her deep, juicy belly. 

 

I feel, somehow, that this cloud is her belly above us, pulled from the centre of the earth and forced into the skies. 

As though she is saying  'look' / 'look what you're doing to me' / 'look how you're hurting me' / 'you can't hide it beneath your feet any longer' / 'I'm going to make you watch'

 

I've started making recordings of her, putting my microphone close to the window when the cloud is particularly low. I can't hear it with my ears, but somehow the microphone translates the churning within - It's so many things all at once, the voice of our cloud, formed by all that we have done to our planet - the smoke, the drills, the toxins, the bleaching. You can feel the pain in her gentle reverberations -  almost a cry. 

 

Yet, it's something else too - reaching, trying, not quite hopeful, not not hopeful either. 

I listen to this and I wonder... If the Earth puts her belly in the sky and tells us to look.

Will we be able to listen?