In My Travels: Phoenix Rising

I was driving home yesterday afternoon and noticed this cloud formation in the sky. It was a bird rising up with wings spread and beak open -- it seemed to fill the whole sky and resonated with something big inside of me. I pulled my car over to the side of the road and searched for my iphone. It took me a few seconds to find it -- and the bird's breast feathers seemed to have exploded within that tiny space of time. But I got a few pics and pulled back onto the highway. I went just a little farther and noticed that the bird actually had a tail that extended -- what? maybe hundreds of miles across the horizon -- ending in a burst of "feathers" reaching up to the sky. I'm sorry I didn't have the type of camera that could have caught the whole image. What an incredible sight and natural magic on such an ordinary day.