Day 25

Sometimes, when you look up at the sky, and the sky is clear and endless, and the entire sky is covered in the same single hue of unattainable blue, and if you look and look long enough, you might lose the sky.  The sky stops being there and instead vanishes into a kind of stretched canvas that attaches whatever there is surrounding it on its four sides – the tops of buildings, for example, or the mountains and the ocean.  Step outside onto the courtyard, or walk along an empty road flanked by mid-level structures, and that same endless sky instead becomes a canopy that straddles the exteriors of the buildings, as if the buildings have turned into the walls supporting a blue roof… or have adopted a third wall of blue that blocks your path down the road.

Step outside next time, and try and see if you can confine the endless sky into an irregular triangle or quadrangle simply with the will of your mind, persuading yourself into an optical illusion with the help of a helpful wind that has blown away all trace of clouds and the sun that has agreed to touch all parts of this aerial dome evenly and equally.

You look and look long enough until you cannot see it.

Do you feel yourself sucked into it?  Into the vastness of space?  Can you touch it?  Reach with your hand, stretch a little bit more and you may… did you feel it?  Is it there?  Then again, who says that the sky only starts high, so high above the ground… isn’t the sky air… and when I extend my hand, am I not touching air? So am I not touching sky?  Am I breathing the sky?  And if I jump and my feet leave the ground, if momentarily… am I not in the sky… am I not flying?

You look and look long enough until you vanish the sky… and then you expand your lungs and lift your feet until there is nothing around you…but sky.

Go on, plunge yourself head on into the sky… all you have to do is jump, since your head is already headed in the right direction… up.  Look up… and you may suddenly notice the strokes of elongated, wistful cirrus clouds weightlessly floating like feathers in the vastness of blue.  And just beneath them, you notice the fluffy, cotton balls of cumulus clouds grouped together like heaps of rock fans on each other’s shoulders, levitating pyramids in the air.  And just beneath them, you notice the rolling rows and overflowing layers of the stratus clouds and you’re mesmerized by them… it reminds you of something… you look closer at them… and under the heat of the sun bearing down on you…

…your world spins as you see an ocean turned upside down on top of your head, with waves frothing into those stratus clouds as they barely creep onto the toasted red sand.  The oncoming waves of the ocean await their turn to make it to shore, their caps gleaming white with the cumulus clouds. And far, far beyond all the waves and their caps and their frothy demises, yonder on the end of infinity you make out the billowing cirrus sails of the immortal sailors, floating their way to the imminent dusk on the other side of the horizon.

All you have to do is jump into the ocean up above your head and feel the watery weight of the sky come rippling around your forehead.

In a few hours, the wind will blow the sailorman and the waves and their frothy licks to the edge of the ocean, right where the blue meets the crests of the mountains along the horizon, where they will await their daily rendezvous with the artist. An artist with no paint, with no brush, with no canvas or easel, an artist that can only but fiercely spit out fire and heat in the form of light coming nowhere close to the surface and the sky on which it paints the most beautiful masterpieces that your eyes will see.

The setting of the sun is approaching, and the sky that was uniform and monotone blue a few seconds ago will now split itself into ascending stairs of purple and blue and green and red, burning with stillness the closer it comes to the horizon of the earth on which it will eventually rain.  The clouds that had boasted the uniqueness of their shapes have now transformed into the brushstrokes of the master creator, uneven and unequal in width and length and hue of orange and gray and brown, carefully laid against the flames, contrasting with the illumination which they battle in the final hours of their day.

This sky, that was nothingness at midday and an ocean of dreams in the late afternoon as now turned into the bosom of a volcanic pit, erupting in its dying glory with each additional stride that the sun takes toward the other side of the world.  The sky is elated to play along, acting as the deserving blank canvas and empty stage for the solo magnum opus of the intelligent artist who will return again on the other side in a few hours, beckoning the sky to greet it once again – selflessly, unimposingly, to the point of being vanished in our illusory imaginations.