Hello friends,
I’ve been thinking a lot about the sky lately. Or, to be more accurate, I’ve been thinking a lot while losing myself in the sky. I can’t pinpoint when this current fascination began. All I know is I now constantly find myself looking up, attempting to decipher the secrets above.
As I became more enamored, it was like the sky itself sent me encouragement. One day, sitting in my inbox was an “Essay on the Sky” by Vincent Katz. The poet gathered disparate observations made over many years into a single love letter to that ever-changing expanse above. The whole piece enchanted me, but one entry, in particular, gave words to what was opening inside of me. Katz writes:
“I am almost becoming overwhelmed by the responsibility of responding to the sky. The more I pay attention to it, the more there is to notice. There is almost not enough time to write it all down, particularly as it constantly shifts.”
This is what I’ve been feeling—that overwhelming responsibility of noticing the sky’s intricacies. Even now, I don’t know where to start. The color, I guess, is as good a place as any. Some days, the blue is so bright and clear it hurts to look too long. There is no beginning, no end. There is only blue. Sometimes, though, if you look long enough, a turkey vulture will enter your field of vision, a lone explorer in that vast sapphire sea.
The blue goes on forever, but it is not eternal. It rises from the morning dawn and fades again into evening’s sunset. The yellow/orange/pink/purple transition of time comes and goes like clockwork, yet it’s always different. No sky appears the same way twice. Its beauty lies in its impermanence. Every day fades to black, sinking into a darkness deeper than we can imagine. Even that inky night, however, comes in varying shades. People focus on the moon and the stars, but the negative space also has a story to tell. The black just tends to speak more subtly than the blue.
There is more than beauty up there; there is an infinite strangeness. The sky is a threshold, one that very few have been lucky enough to cross. Beyond it lies a cosmos that we’re still trying to understand. But you don’t need to leave the sky to find something unusual. One of the first tableaus that drew my attention upward was an arrangement of clouds I’d never seen before. A blanket of cumulous cotton balls stretched across the sky, illuminated by the setting sun. But an errant stratus cloud pierced through them, interrupting their soft gathering. I couldn’t look away. I relished the red light that brought traffic to a halt. The setting sun turned the rest of the world into silhouettes in amber, and I, too, became still.
On a different day, I sat in a parking lot waiting for my mom to finish physical therapy. I rolled down the windows and gazed up at the clouds. The open moonroof framed them like a photo, and, for a time, nothing existed outside that rectangle of sky. Two patches of clouds rolled toward each other like waves crashing onto a beach in slow motion. I watched them so intently that they no longer appeared real, like when you say a word so many times you wonder whether you’re saying it correctly. I only looked away when my mom opened the car door, startling me from my reverie.
In Katz’s “Essay on the Sky,” he writes about potentially stopping the project:
I should think it time to stop this piece. I realize I won’t ever get anywhere, just as the sky, too, never gets anywhere. It changes, and the changes can have effects, but the sky itself is a canvas, or screen, on which spectators map their expectations and fears. I am trying to live without fears, or memories—where memories mean anguish or remorse. But still I want to study the sky: that is, look at it and think the thoughts I am free to think when looking at the sky. So I will not stop.
I will not stop either, for the sky is a mirror inside my soul. Everything slows down when you look up, and yet nothing stops completely. We are tiny things spinning through space, holding onto the planet by our fingertips. At any moment, we might float away, but maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
Until next time,
Yardena
WEEKEND POTPOURRI:
Currently on repeat:
This letter from Helen Keller to the New York Symphony Orchestra is a reminder of the power of music, even for those who cannot hear it.
A poem:
Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.You need not die today.
Stay here--through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.
— Gwendolyn Brooks, “To the Young Who Want to Die”