Of Clouds and Silver Linings
A short story of hope in the midst of dark clouds
I had been told for years that every cloud has a silver lining. That statement though positive and encouraging is factually false. Look out, most clouds don’t have silver linings, so how do we live in a world of clouds without silver linings? There is one way.
Hear my story in its telling.
On the small Caribbean island of Grenada, I stood on the tiled balcony of a cliff-edge villa overlooking the Atlantic. My eyes were dry, clear with hope shinning through but my soul carried the weight of moist air. Life carries rain clouds, even in paradise.
Waking up to the view above, I stared at clouds every morning. And that was when I noticed. Not every cloud had a silver lining.
The proverbial saying was first coined by John Milton in 1634 his poem, Cosmus: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle quoted here
Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
It was then widely used in Victorian London and in 1840, by Mrs S. Hall, write the following in a review of the novel Marian; or, a Young Maid’s Fortunes, As Katty Macane has it, “there’s a silver lining to every cloud that sails about the heavens if we could only see…
