In tonight’s bedtime story for kids, we’re learning about why the clouds sometimes take on beautiful, whimsical shapes, like a teddy bear, or a dolphin, or a galloping horse… it’s all down to an air spirit, named Celeste. Let’s find out how! Relax, get sleepy, and let’s begin!
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Narrator 🎙 Abbe Opher
Author ✍️ Jane Thomas
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:00:10
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Koala Moon, a podcast of
00:00:14
Speaker 1: original children's bedtime stories and meditations designed to make bedtime
00:00:19
Speaker 1: and dream Coco and I have noticed that more and
00:00:23
Speaker 1: more of you are joining the Coco Club lately, and
00:00:25
Speaker 1: it's really put a spring in our step. Tonight's thanks
00:00:28
Speaker 1: for going out to Inara, Lyra's sister Goldie from Salem, Oregon,
00:00:33
Speaker 1: Sonny and Bella from Los Osos, California, Leo from Vermont,
00:00:39
Speaker 1: Callum and Braden from Canada, and also Scout from Vancouver Island.
00:00:44
Speaker 1: Such cool places. I hope you find lots of news
00:00:47
Speaker 1: stories and get to know Sleepy Forest, the Jupiter Twins,
00:00:50
Speaker 1: Hector and Sonny, the dream Givers, and all the other
00:00:53
Speaker 1: characters as well as I do. It's fun having you
00:00:56
Speaker 1: all here with us. And as always, if you have
00:00:58
Speaker 1: a friend who'd also like to join the Coco Club,
00:01:01
Speaker 1: the info on how to do it is in the
00:01:02
Speaker 1: show notes of this episode. Now, then back to Tonight's story,
00:01:07
Speaker 1: we're learning something truly brilliant. I don't know about you,
00:01:11
Speaker 1: but I've often wondered why when I look up at
00:01:15
Speaker 1: the clouds they seem to sometimes take on beautiful, whimsical shapes.
00:01:20
Speaker 1: Like a teddy bear or a dolphin or a galloping horse.
00:01:25
Speaker 1: Well tonight, I'm happy to be able to tell you
00:01:28
Speaker 1: the answer. But first, lie down in bed and take
00:01:32
Speaker 1: a lovely deep breath in and out there you go,
00:01:37
Speaker 1: wriggle around a bit and get really, really comfy, and
00:01:41
Speaker 1: then just relax back and imagine that you're lying on
00:01:45
Speaker 1: your back on a warm summer's day. You're on the grass,
00:01:50
Speaker 1: spread out like a star and looking up at the sky,
00:01:54
Speaker 1: and the clouds are slowly shifting this way and that
00:01:59
Speaker 1: as they ease their way across the blue. A panda
00:02:04
Speaker 1: appears and gives you a gentle wave, and then it
00:02:07
Speaker 1: becomes a whale pushing its way out of the sea.
00:02:13
Speaker 1: And now it's a dolphin and a seal and a
00:02:17
Speaker 1: koala wrapped around the branch of a tree. Keep your
00:02:22
Speaker 1: eyes closed and watch as the cloud changes into whatever
00:02:27
Speaker 1: you want it to be. As you lie there, soft
00:02:30
Speaker 1: and warm, calm and safe, watching the magic dance. Well,
00:02:38
Speaker 1: did you know it's all down to an air spirit
00:02:41
Speaker 1: named Celeste. Let's find out how this is. The Cloud
00:02:47
Speaker 1: Plumpers by Jane Thomas A terribly long time ago, back
00:02:58
Speaker 1: when the world was things were all a little bit different.
00:03:04
Speaker 1: There wasn't as much going on as there is today.
00:03:06
Speaker 1: You see, when the stars in the sky look down
00:03:10
Speaker 1: at a brand new, fresh out of the box planet Earth,
00:03:14
Speaker 1: they didn't see all the cities and roads and villages
00:03:18
Speaker 1: and playing fields that you know. It was all mountains
00:03:23
Speaker 1: and rivers and huge sheets of ice floating slowly across
00:03:28
Speaker 1: frozen seas. Imagine standing on top of a mountain and
00:03:34
Speaker 1: looking out at a world that is only forests and
00:03:37
Speaker 1: trees and flowers. There are no winding pathways going this
00:03:43
Speaker 1: way and that, and no picnic benches in perfect placements
00:03:47
Speaker 1: by a bend in a river. No bridges, not the
00:03:52
Speaker 1: huge ones that stretch for miles across estuaries or the
00:03:56
Speaker 1: tiny stone ones that reach over the smallest stream. No
00:04:01
Speaker 1: road signs telling you that it's this way to reach
00:04:05
Speaker 1: one place or that way to reach another place, because really,
00:04:10
Speaker 1: when it comes down to it, there are no places
00:04:13
Speaker 1: to visit anyway. This is the world that the original
00:04:17
Speaker 1: cloud plumpers saw. It was only in the late sixteenth
00:04:22
Speaker 1: century that anyone realized these cloud plumpers existed at all,
00:04:26
Speaker 1: and they named them Sylphs, or spirits of the air,
00:04:31
Speaker 1: and to be honest. At first, they weren't quite sure
00:04:34
Speaker 1: what their job was. Some of them thought their duty
00:04:38
Speaker 1: was to provide echoes, so anytime someone went woohoo into
00:04:44
Speaker 1: a tunnel, had little invisible character floated around and shouted
00:04:48
Speaker 1: it right back. But Sylphs in fact have a far
00:04:53
Speaker 1: more important job than just being an echo. Sylphs are
00:04:58
Speaker 1: the invisible sprites who fly around the sky and they
00:05:02
Speaker 1: push the clouds this way and that to form different shapes.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: It is only in relatively recent years, though, that clouds
00:05:11
Speaker 1: have started taking on particular shapes. So when you lie
00:05:16
Speaker 1: on your back in a field, you get to suddenly
00:05:19
Speaker 1: see a cloud take the form of a teddy bear
00:05:23
Speaker 1: or a turtle. Before they were just made cloud shaped.
00:05:28
Speaker 1: And this new innovation was all because of a cheeky
00:05:32
Speaker 1: little sylph named Celeste. Celeste learned how to shape the
00:05:37
Speaker 1: clouds by watching all her friends and family. Sylphs or
00:05:43
Speaker 1: cloud plumpers, live high up in the sky, and because
00:05:48
Speaker 1: they're invisible to the human eye, you'll never see them. Well,
00:05:52
Speaker 1: there is a way, but it's very complicated and involves
00:05:56
Speaker 1: moonbeams and catching a falling star, and we won't get
00:05:59
Speaker 1: into that now. At first, for many, many centuries, the
00:06:05
Speaker 1: cloud plumpers just plumped clouds into the sort of shapes
00:06:08
Speaker 1: they thought looked nice. These are where the run of
00:06:12
Speaker 1: the mill, nicely predictable, standard fluffy, white clouds come from.
00:06:18
Speaker 1: They're all curves and smooth edges, and unless the fashion
00:06:24
Speaker 1: suddenly change, it's likely you will only ever see clouds
00:06:28
Speaker 1: with very rounded sides. These sprites aren't spiky creatures at all,
00:06:34
Speaker 1: and although they experimented with square shapes and triangles and
00:06:39
Speaker 1: even complicated hexagons, it was rapidly agreed the whole world
00:06:43
Speaker 1: over that straight edged clouds just looked wrong. And so
00:06:49
Speaker 1: this is the world Celeste was born into. She loved
00:06:53
Speaker 1: her job of plumping up clouds, and sometimes she and
00:06:57
Speaker 1: the sprites would get together and put loads of little
00:07:00
Speaker 1: bits of cloud in rows and form what the humans
00:07:04
Speaker 1: down below would refer to as buttermilk sky, and later
00:07:08
Speaker 1: on as mackerel sky. Only the sprites themselves didn't know this,
00:07:15
Speaker 1: of course, because living high up in the clouds, they
00:07:19
Speaker 1: had no use for things like buttermilk or mackerels, and
00:07:23
Speaker 1: had no idea what such things were. Celeste changed all that.
00:07:30
Speaker 1: She spent years learning to puff and shape and round
00:07:34
Speaker 1: out the clouds, and yet more years learning to take
00:07:38
Speaker 1: part in those mackerel skies, and more years putting the
00:07:42
Speaker 1: big black clouds into thunderstorms. She even took advanced courses
00:07:49
Speaker 1: and found out how to put lightning bolts into clouds
00:07:52
Speaker 1: so they lit up as they danced through the skies.
00:07:56
Speaker 1: But she started to want something more, and she and
00:08:00
Speaker 1: peering down at Earth far far below, seeing the huge
00:08:05
Speaker 1: green blobs that were of course land, and the huge
00:08:09
Speaker 1: blue blobs that were of course sea, and even the
00:08:14
Speaker 1: huge white blobs on the top and the bottom, which
00:08:18
Speaker 1: she thought were just large cloud stores but were in
00:08:21
Speaker 1: fact the Arctic and Antarctica and huge sheets of snow
00:08:26
Speaker 1: covered ice. C Leste started off by trying to move
00:08:31
Speaker 1: the clouds into the same shapes as the big green
00:08:35
Speaker 1: blobs she saw. This meant that for many years people
00:08:40
Speaker 1: on Earth looking up, saw lots of clouds in the
00:08:43
Speaker 1: shapes of entire continents, and they could say to each other, oh, look,
00:08:50
Speaker 1: there's a cloud that's just like Africa, or goodness me
00:08:57
Speaker 1: if that doesn't look exactly like America. In fact, Celeste
00:09:03
Speaker 1: became extremely good at making the continents so much so
00:09:08
Speaker 1: that she liked to put on displays in the sky
00:09:11
Speaker 1: and could rapidly transform Australasia into Asia with a few
00:09:15
Speaker 1: quick puffs and flicks of her fingers. The other cloud
00:09:20
Speaker 1: shapers would watch what she was doing and try to
00:09:23
Speaker 1: copy her, and some of them became pretty good as well,
00:09:28
Speaker 1: but nobody could ever be quite as good as Celeste.
00:09:33
Speaker 1: This was something she loved doing, and if you love
00:09:37
Speaker 1: doing something, that will always shine through. After a while,
00:09:43
Speaker 1: Celeste wanted a new challenge. When all the other sprites
00:09:47
Speaker 1: were fast asleep and the clouds were just being left
00:09:51
Speaker 1: to drift around and do their own thing, Celeste took
00:09:55
Speaker 1: a great, big breath, summoned up every ounce of courage
00:09:59
Speaker 1: she could, and flew closer to planet Earth. She didn't
00:10:05
Speaker 1: land on the Earth, nothing as brave as that, but
00:10:08
Speaker 1: she came close enough to see the mountain ranges. She
00:10:12
Speaker 1: saw jagged Everest reaching higher than any of the others.
00:10:18
Speaker 1: And she saw a perfectly pointed mountain with a little
00:10:22
Speaker 1: cap of snow that was Mount Fuji. She saw a
00:10:27
Speaker 1: white cap mountain on a vast continent that seemed to
00:10:30
Speaker 1: be almost entirely made up of green and red, and
00:10:34
Speaker 1: that was Kilimanjaro. She saw Mount Olympus, where the Greek
00:10:39
Speaker 1: gods were said to have lived, and Mount Etna, a
00:10:43
Speaker 1: volcano from which a plume of smoke gently rose, and Araki,
00:10:49
Speaker 1: and Mount Denali and Kinnabalu, and so in the weeks
00:10:54
Speaker 1: that followed, she returned to the clouds and shaped them
00:10:58
Speaker 1: to look just like the mountain she'd seen, And people
00:11:02
Speaker 1: looked up at the sky and gasped to see entire
00:11:06
Speaker 1: mountain ranges copied into the skies above, watching as the
00:11:12
Speaker 1: Alps transformed into the Andes and the Himalayas became the Rockies.
00:11:19
Speaker 1: Celeste had such a good memory for everything she saw,
00:11:22
Speaker 1: and could shape the clouds with such detail that people
00:11:26
Speaker 1: who saw the clouds knew exactly where the shapes came from.
00:11:31
Speaker 1: At least the people who knew an awful lot about mountains.
00:11:36
Speaker 1: Celeste had no idea, But artists were starting to paint
00:11:41
Speaker 1: pictures that paid a lot more attention to clouds, and
00:11:45
Speaker 1: they included some of her wonderful shapes. Until then, clouds
00:11:51
Speaker 1: had just been large white masses in the sky that
00:11:54
Speaker 1: bulged and moved around seemingly on a whim. Now there
00:12:00
Speaker 1: were something extra special. After Celeste had mastered the clouds
00:12:07
Speaker 1: in the shapes of mountains. She wanted a new challenge,
00:12:12
Speaker 1: so she dared herself to fly even closer to the
00:12:16
Speaker 1: earth and see what new inspiration waited for her there again,
00:12:22
Speaker 1: she disappeared when all the other sprites were fast asleep
00:12:27
Speaker 1: and the clouds were left to their own devices. She
00:12:32
Speaker 1: had a choice to either go to the dark side
00:12:35
Speaker 1: of the world, where it was night, or the lighter
00:12:39
Speaker 1: side of the world, where it was day. Because Celeste
00:12:43
Speaker 1: didn't know that she was invisible to the human eye
00:12:47
Speaker 1: except under those very special circumstances I mentioned before, she
00:12:52
Speaker 1: decided it was safest to go to the dark side.
00:12:57
Speaker 1: This meant that lit by the moon and the stars,
00:13:01
Speaker 1: Celeste got to see a lot of silhouettes, dark shapes
00:13:06
Speaker 1: against the deep blue of the night sky. She started
00:13:11
Speaker 1: to see trees, entire forests at first, but slowly as
00:13:17
Speaker 1: she dared to get closer and closer, she could see
00:13:21
Speaker 1: the individual shapes of different trees. It amazed Celeste how
00:13:27
Speaker 1: many different kinds there were and what different shapes they took.
00:13:33
Speaker 1: A weeping willow leaning gently over a stream was a
00:13:38
Speaker 1: very different tree to a palm tree standing upright alongside
00:13:43
Speaker 1: a beach. An entire forest of fairs was one thing,
00:13:48
Speaker 1: and a woodland of oaks was quite another. By the
00:13:53
Speaker 1: time Celeste went back to her home in the sky,
00:13:56
Speaker 1: she had hundreds of new shapes and ideas in her mind.
00:14:01
Speaker 1: She set to work the very next day, fashioning entire
00:14:06
Speaker 1: forests out of clouds, and then making others into a
00:14:10
Speaker 1: series of horse chestnuts or eucalyptus, or long lines of
00:14:16
Speaker 1: cypress trees standing straight and alert sentinels in neat rows
00:14:23
Speaker 1: that soared into the sky. Celeste moved and shaped and
00:14:30
Speaker 1: puffed the clouds until they were exactly right and down
00:14:35
Speaker 1: on earth, people began to notice the new things that
00:14:39
Speaker 1: were appearing above. Some started spending entire days lying down
00:14:45
Speaker 1: on soft, green, grassy mounds, just lying back and watching
00:14:50
Speaker 1: the clouds above them move this way in that people
00:14:56
Speaker 1: would meet on their days off and go in large groups,
00:15:01
Speaker 1: armed with picnic blankets and baskets filled with sandwiches and
00:15:06
Speaker 1: sausage rolls, taking over entire parks on their little colored
00:15:12
Speaker 1: squares of blanket. Again, the other cloud shapers copied Celeste,
00:15:19
Speaker 1: and they too, learned to love the challenge of creating
00:15:23
Speaker 1: the perfect tree. Of course, you can guess what happened next.
00:15:30
Speaker 1: I'm sure Celeste soon found she had mastered the art
00:15:36
Speaker 1: of trees and she needed another challenge. This time, when
00:15:41
Speaker 1: she came down to Earth, she flew even closer, seeing
00:15:46
Speaker 1: the shapes of animals. She dared to go a little earlier,
00:15:52
Speaker 1: this time when the sky was red and gold with
00:15:56
Speaker 1: the sunset, and as it happened, she flew down to Africa.
00:16:02
Speaker 1: This meant she was able to see the heads of
00:16:05
Speaker 1: giraffes silhouetted against the setting sun, and the shapes of
00:16:12
Speaker 1: elephants moving slowly across the plains, their trunks swinging gently
00:16:19
Speaker 1: from side to side. The horns of rhinos glinted in
00:16:25
Speaker 1: the evening light, and hippos blew silvery bubbles in pools
00:16:30
Speaker 1: of mud. She saw lions and cheetahs and leopards moving
00:16:37
Speaker 1: stealthily across the land, and monkeys swinging this way and
00:16:42
Speaker 1: that in the trees. She saw the first owls head
00:16:47
Speaker 1: out into the sky at night, and the last swallows
00:16:52
Speaker 1: and rollers and kingfishes heading back to their homes. Celeste
00:16:59
Speaker 1: had so much to play with when she went back
00:17:02
Speaker 1: to the clouds, and it wasn't long before entire safaris
00:17:07
Speaker 1: of animals appeared in the sky. Giraffes stood peacefully beside lions,
00:17:14
Speaker 1: and hippos wallowed in pools where elephants drank. Owls swooped
00:17:21
Speaker 1: across the sky wings outspread, and tiny swallows darted this
00:17:28
Speaker 1: way and that. Trees, of course, stand still, except for
00:17:33
Speaker 1: swaying gently to and fro in the wind. But animals move,
00:17:39
Speaker 1: and Celeste now had the idea to make her clouds
00:17:43
Speaker 1: move across the sky. Some of the other cloud shapers
00:17:49
Speaker 1: watched what she was trying to do, and she explained
00:17:53
Speaker 1: how the legs of a giraffe moved, and how the
00:17:57
Speaker 1: neck would lift and lower as it were. And soon
00:18:02
Speaker 1: they worked in teams to make scenes that saw giraffes
00:18:07
Speaker 1: sweeping across plains, and camels walking in long lines across
00:18:13
Speaker 1: the tops of sand dunes, and elephants running and trumpeting
00:18:19
Speaker 1: their trunks into the air above. People on Earth started
00:18:25
Speaker 1: to get notebooks to record everything they saw in the sky,
00:18:30
Speaker 1: because the scenes were so magical that they were worth remembering.
00:18:37
Speaker 1: They were in competition with each other to be the
00:18:40
Speaker 1: first to spot a rhino or a red fox, and
00:18:45
Speaker 1: whispers would often sweep around cities when a particularly excellent
00:18:50
Speaker 1: elephant or some such thing appeared in the sky above.
00:18:55
Speaker 1: Of course, you had to be in a certain spot
00:18:59
Speaker 1: to be able to see everything just as it was,
00:19:03
Speaker 1: because Celeste had only ever seen these shapes, the silhouettes,
00:19:08
Speaker 1: and she had no idea that everything wasn't completely flat.
00:19:15
Speaker 1: But that time was coming because the more Celeste made,
00:19:20
Speaker 1: the more excited she became, and the more she wanted
00:19:24
Speaker 1: to know, and the more she wanted to know, the
00:19:29
Speaker 1: more daring she became, heading down to the lighter and
00:19:34
Speaker 1: lighter parts of the world and staying for longer, which
00:19:40
Speaker 1: is how she learned that all the trees and animals
00:19:44
Speaker 1: weren't flat at all, but they went off in all
00:19:48
Speaker 1: directions and were tall and wide and round, And that
00:19:54
Speaker 1: completely changed the way she approached her cloud shaping. Now,
00:20:02
Speaker 1: people standing hundreds of miles apart could all see a
00:20:06
Speaker 1: fir tree appear in the sky because Celeste was making
00:20:10
Speaker 1: something that wasn't just flat. They could see a giraffe
00:20:15
Speaker 1: running away from them, or running across the sky, or
00:20:19
Speaker 1: running towards them, depending on where they stood. You have
00:20:24
Speaker 1: to remember that this was all taking place a long
00:20:29
Speaker 1: time before things like television were invented. Imagine that you've
00:20:35
Speaker 1: only ever seen perhaps one or two pictures in a
00:20:38
Speaker 1: book of an elephant, and suddenly you have an entire
00:20:42
Speaker 1: show reel dancing across the sky. He would also start
00:20:48
Speaker 1: spending a lot of time outdoors. I imagine if something
00:20:52
Speaker 1: disincredible started happening all of a sudden. Celeste was something
00:20:58
Speaker 1: of a perfectionist, and she put the right trees and
00:21:02
Speaker 1: plants alongside the right creatures. And she made sure that
00:21:06
Speaker 1: the things she saw in Australia, the koalas and kangaroos,
00:21:11
Speaker 1: the crocodiles, and the wombats appeared in the sky over America,
00:21:17
Speaker 1: for example, and the pandas from Asia floated about as
00:21:22
Speaker 1: soft white clouds over Europe, and the slots and jaguars
00:21:28
Speaker 1: of South America drifted over Africa. The whole world learned
00:21:34
Speaker 1: an awful lot about other parts of the world through
00:21:37
Speaker 1: looking at the clouds that Celeste and her fellow cloud
00:21:41
Speaker 1: shapers created. She became so brave and so excited by
00:21:48
Speaker 1: the possibilities that she started spending more and more time
00:21:53
Speaker 1: down on planet Earth. She looked at the tiniest details,
00:21:59
Speaker 1: seeing every insect that strutted its way across a leaf,
00:22:03
Speaker 1: and every jellyfish that pulsed its way around the sea,
00:22:08
Speaker 1: and the turtles that floated, and the tiny shells that
00:22:13
Speaker 1: hung about on the waterline. She started going into the
00:22:18
Speaker 1: houses of people when she was really feeling brave, and
00:22:22
Speaker 1: saw all the things they made, so teddy bears and
00:22:27
Speaker 1: trousers and kettles and toasters, candles and clocks and hats
00:22:35
Speaker 1: and necklaces all became part of her repertoire. The years
00:22:41
Speaker 1: passed and the cloud shapers became extraordinarily talented. They are
00:22:47
Speaker 1: all essentially artists, if you think about it. With the
00:22:52
Speaker 1: very strange medium of clouds rather than pen or ink
00:22:57
Speaker 1: or paint, they shaped the clouds as beautifully as a
00:23:01
Speaker 1: sculptor or shape a block of marble, and in fact,
00:23:05
Speaker 1: many of the most famous sculptures in the world came
00:23:09
Speaker 1: from clouds that Celeste and the other Sprites created. A
00:23:15
Speaker 1: French sculptor called Rodin copied some clouds he had seen
00:23:19
Speaker 1: one day and made perhaps his most famous piece of all,
00:23:24
Speaker 1: called the Kiss, and funny enough, this was taken from
00:23:29
Speaker 1: something Celeste had seen one day in a park, and
00:23:33
Speaker 1: his other really famous piece, The Thinker, was again taken
00:23:37
Speaker 1: from a cloud, which again with something celested seen outside
00:23:42
Speaker 1: a library one evening, a man leaning his elbow on
00:23:46
Speaker 1: his knee and having a good long think to himself.
00:23:52
Speaker 1: There is a statue standing in Georgia today, the country,
00:23:56
Speaker 1: not the American state, where two people moved, moved towards
00:24:00
Speaker 1: each other and come together as one in a hug.
00:24:05
Speaker 1: It is called the Statue of Love, and it was
00:24:09
Speaker 1: designed by someone who saw exactly this thing happen in
00:24:13
Speaker 1: the clouds one morning, as Celeste moved them around in
00:24:17
Speaker 1: new and exciting ways. Celeste, of course, had no idea
00:24:23
Speaker 1: that she was changing the way things were done on Earth.
00:24:27
Speaker 1: She thought she was just copying them. One day, she
00:24:32
Speaker 1: went into an enormous art gallery, one of those huge
00:24:35
Speaker 1: ones in Paris that go on for room after room.
00:24:41
Speaker 1: By this time, Celeste had learned that curiously no humans
00:24:46
Speaker 1: could see her, so she was bold enough to go
00:24:49
Speaker 1: right into that gallery. She's a very polite sprite, though,
00:24:55
Speaker 1: so she had joined the queue and waited her turn
00:24:58
Speaker 1: to go in, had a confusing moment with the ticket agent,
00:25:02
Speaker 1: who of course couldn't see her, and then she'd had
00:25:06
Speaker 1: to wait for someone to go through the turnstiles. So
00:25:09
Speaker 1: she could sneak in with them, because it seemed wrong
00:25:12
Speaker 1: not to enter the gallery in the proper way. Celeste
00:25:18
Speaker 1: went through centuries and centuries of paintings, starting with some
00:25:23
Speaker 1: that had been painted over eight hundred years ago, and
00:25:27
Speaker 1: working her way through the years. It is hardly surprising
00:25:32
Speaker 1: that she looked at the paintings to see what had
00:25:35
Speaker 1: been done with the clouds. She looked at how the
00:25:39
Speaker 1: artists had changed what they had included, and was delighted
00:25:43
Speaker 1: to see some paintings with her fanciful clouds of elephants
00:25:48
Speaker 1: marching and teddy bears reaching out their arms. But on
00:25:53
Speaker 1: the whole it seemed that artists preferred clouds to be
00:25:57
Speaker 1: much more like the original cloud, soft puffy balls of
00:26:03
Speaker 1: white drifting this way and that, in beautifully rounded shapes.
00:26:10
Speaker 1: Celeste visited galleries all around the world, looking at some
00:26:15
Speaker 1: of the most famous pieces ever painted. She even went
00:26:20
Speaker 1: into the Sistine Chapel in Rome in Italy, looking up
00:26:25
Speaker 1: at the inside of the vast dome and puffs of
00:26:28
Speaker 1: white cloud there. She went to New York and London
00:26:34
Speaker 1: and Buenos Aires and Sydney, Singapore and Tokyo and Nairobi
00:26:41
Speaker 1: and Johannesburg. She looked at paintings in huge galleries and
00:26:48
Speaker 1: paintings in the tiniest sheds in the smallest villages, and
00:26:53
Speaker 1: hardly ever did she see a picture that included a
00:26:57
Speaker 1: cloud shaped like a tea kettle or a side table,
00:27:02
Speaker 1: or one of her favorites, a kingfisher. It seemed very
00:27:07
Speaker 1: strange that even the weeping willows and mountain rangers didn't
00:27:12
Speaker 1: make it into paintings, at least not as clouds. So
00:27:18
Speaker 1: Celeste went back up to the skies and had a
00:27:21
Speaker 1: good long think. She decided that people had become so
00:27:27
Speaker 1: used to seeing all her amazing artwork that they had
00:27:31
Speaker 1: stopped appreciating it and the efforts she put in. She
00:27:37
Speaker 1: spread the word among the other sprites that they were
00:27:40
Speaker 1: only to create the special shape she had taught them
00:27:44
Speaker 1: on very rare occasions, and they should focus on old fashioned, fluffy, white,
00:27:50
Speaker 1: rounded clouds instead. She also told them that over the
00:27:58
Speaker 1: bits of blue on the planet, and over the bits
00:28:01
Speaker 1: of white on either end, the seas and oceans and
00:28:06
Speaker 1: the vast escapes, there were hardly any people at all,
00:28:12
Speaker 1: So if any cloud shaper felt the need to recreate
00:28:16
Speaker 1: a giraffe or a camel or a koala. It was
00:28:20
Speaker 1: perhaps best to do it in clouds over those sections
00:28:24
Speaker 1: of the world. Also, she said, most people seemed to
00:28:29
Speaker 1: go to sleep when it was dark, and hardly anybody
00:28:33
Speaker 1: looked up at the sky, so that was another good
00:28:36
Speaker 1: time to play games with the clouds. If you lie
00:28:42
Speaker 1: down and look at the clouds go by nowadays, sometimes
00:28:47
Speaker 1: you'll see one form the shape of a castle, just
00:28:50
Speaker 1: for a moment, or perhaps a night on horseback galloping
00:28:54
Speaker 1: towards it, or perhaps a dragon or a dolphin or
00:29:01
Speaker 1: a rose. These are the clouds that appear when one
00:29:05
Speaker 1: of the cloud shapers is creating an extra special treat.
00:29:10
Speaker 1: They'll lonely last for a few moments sometimes, and then
00:29:14
Speaker 1: the clouds will go back to being your standard fluffy
00:29:18
Speaker 1: white balls drifting through the sky. But those magical moments
00:29:25
Speaker 1: are created by Celeste and her friends moving clouds around
00:29:30
Speaker 1: during one of their games and making something wonderful just
00:29:35
Speaker 1: for you to see. Imagine now, as you lie in
00:29:40
Speaker 1: your bed, that you're lying on your back on a
00:29:43
Speaker 1: warm summer's day, you're on the grass, spread out like
00:29:49
Speaker 1: a star and looking up at the sky, and the
00:29:54
Speaker 1: clouds are slowly shifting this way and that. As they
00:29:59
Speaker 1: ease their away across the blue, a panda appears and
00:30:05
Speaker 1: gives you a gentle wave. And then it becomes a
00:30:09
Speaker 1: whil pushing its way out of the sea. And now
00:30:15
Speaker 1: it's a dolphin and a seal and a koala wrapped
00:30:21
Speaker 1: around the branch of a tree. Keep your eyes closed
00:30:28
Speaker 1: and watch as the cloud changes into whatever you want
00:30:34
Speaker 1: it to be as you lie soft and warm, calm
00:30:42
Speaker 1: and safe, watching the magic dance. Isn't the world a
00:30:50
Speaker 1: wonderful place? Them? U