“The Shaman’s Lesson” from “Remembering Eternity”
“The sun stood behind them. A beam of its light struck the overlaid chevrons of lapis and turquoise in the ring on Roberto’s index finger, causing the blue arrowheads to scintillate. Following the gleaming apex of the stone, the student’s sight line took him to a strange cloud formation in the west: a circle of white with nearly perfect perimeter smoothness. For a few seconds the sunlight intensified and the radiance from the ring grew blinding. It seemed as if the stones magnified and focused the rays on the top of the nebular round; indeed, the midpoint of its upper surface began to glow as if it were a diamond atop a giant mounting. Then the diamond opened up, pulling with it both sides of the upper arc of the cloud ring. Fibrils of cloud like stamens separated out from the vapory mass and exploded white hot in the broadside of sunlight. What had been a circle became a goblet whose bottom had risen so that the filaments stretched up out of that base. The cloud now looked like a mile-wide flower with its petals extended like open arms to the sky and its reproductive organs enticingly exposed. Roberto now turned his head in the opposite direction, toward the top of the tulip tree next to them. Skylar looked up into its high branches and saw a lovely flower with a yellowish-green corolla tinged at the bottom with bright orange. What stopped his breath, though, was not the beauty of the blossom but the fact that it possessed a shape identical to that of the cloud form floating high above it.”
https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Eternity-Inside-Permanent-Enlightenment-ebook/dp/B01B9YPAU0
