The Sky Rules

It's what I notice first every year, even before the foamy breakers, the spun-sugar sand. It's the sky: vast and blue and dotted with clouds.

Here at the beach the sky stretches out boldly to the horizon, no curtain of green to obscure it. 

Were I to live always beneath such a sky, I'd feel bare and exposed. But when I'm here, for this precious week, it opens me up, enlarges my vision. 

Here at the beach, the sky rules. 

Night Light

Watching the light fade last night, I see leaves grow indistinct, dark masses without color. 

Searching for bats, I see blurred forms cut through the darkness, visible only when they cross a patch of still-blue sky.

As sunlight vanishes, fireflies rouse themselves from the ground, blink and twinkle as they flutter their way to the treetops.

Closer to where I'm sitting, the deck lights snap to attention. They've been storing sunlight all day and now release it.

Two types of night light on an early July evening. 

Stopping for Sunset

A late walk, not timed for sunset but finding it anyway. There at the end of the street, the end of the neighborhood, the end of the day.

It was not an untrammeled view. Lines and lights and poles obscured it. But maybe, I thought as I snapped, they were the point. Stop, say the red lights. Savor the colors, the clouds, the setting sun. Make time for them as often as you can.  

Bluuuue Sky

It's not cerulean or azure or aquamarine. To describe the sky I saw on yesterday's walk, we need a new word. I propose bluuuue. Not blue, or even bluuue. This is bluuuue (four 'u's) at its purest and most intense. The hue of a cloudless sky.

I have a reason for describing this on Father's Day.  Dad was the king of blue skies. He didn't seem to notice the clouds, or if he did, he chose to ignore them.

So in honor of him, and fathers everywhere, the bluest bluuuue sky photo I can find.

With Its Diadem

I took an evening walk last night, one week after the eclipse. Without thinking I headed west, toward the setting sun. 

I think of our nearest star differently now, having seen it, well, naked is not exactly the word. Exposed isn't either. Transformed? Chastened? I won't use Emily Dickinson's phrase "without its diadem" because a corona is a diadem if ever I saw one.

It's more that the sun and I (and millions of other people) now have a special bond. We've been through something together. So when I watch it sink low in the sky and redden the horizon, I think of when the horizon reddened in every direction. I remember the cool air and the bird song and the glowing white ring.

It's nice to be reminded of all that.

(Photo: NASA)

In the End

Back home now after two 12-hour drives that bookended a day of planetary splendor. First, I want to credit the supporting cast, the resplendent redbud trees that lined the highway and gave my weary eyes something to feast on, counteracting the white-line fever. 

And the clouds themselves, which provided a light show late Sunday as crepuscular rays slanted down to the flat, black, Indiana fields, already plowed, waiting to be planted.  The clouds that politely parted on Monday, letting the sun and moon steal the show. The clouds that returned Tuesday, making for a muted and pleasant drive east.

But it was Earth's star and satellite that stole the show. Our own sun, in a form I'd never seen before. Not blotted out but transformed, covered enough to let its true splendor shine forth "like shining from shook foil." 

Since Monday afternoon I've been trying to put the feeling into words. It was awe-inspiring, yes. Once-in-a-lifetime, yes again. Most of all, it was comforting. It was light winning out in the end. 

(Monday, April 8, 3:04 p.m.)

Total Eclipse

The temperature dropped.  Birds sang their roosting songs. And then, the sun went away. All that was left was a ring of fire. 

Our safety glasses came off, someone blasted "A Total Eclipse of the Heart," and for almost four minutes we gaped in amazement at the darkened world, the weird twilight, our hilltop transformed.

I looked up and around, to the left and the right, marveled at the 360-degree "sunset." I felt a shiver up my spine that had nothing to do with the temperature. And then, it was over. 

"This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt," wrote Annie Dillard in an essay called "Total Eclipse," "the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres, flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds."

I looked at my photos, none of which captured the corona, and there, glimmering in the lower right-hand corner of one, was a single white dot. It was the planet Venus — in the middle of an Indiana afternoon. 

Witness to Wonder

It happened at 6:50 p.m. the night before last. A burst of light in the sky, a fireball or meteor, a visitor from space, vanished before those who glimpsed it even knew what they were seeing. 

What was I doing at the time? Swapping out the old red plastic egg crate toy bins for new cloth ones? Or had I already come upstairs to fix dinner? One thing is certain: I was not outside looking up. 

I'm thinking of Bruegel's famous painting The Fall of Icarus, and Auden's poem about it, how human suffering can be obscured by the ordinariness of life. The same can be said of wonder.  How often we miss it. Our heads are down, focused on the page or the skillet, the task at hand. 

Most of the videos sent to the American Meteor Society are from home security cameras. There's no one around to see the meteorological marvel. But one of them shows a man taking out his garbage. You see the falling star with its long tail. You see him see it. He stops in his tracks, trash bag in hand. A witness to wonder. 

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Jollity

Last night under the stars, a glimpse of the planets:  At Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts, the National Symphony Orchestra performed Gustav Holst's "The Planets," accompanied by NASA photographs, with my favorite movement, "Jupiter: the Bringer of Jollity," scoring the most applause. 

Jollity is defined as "the quality of being cheerful." Can a planet be cheerful? Perhaps if it's named after the king of the gods. Or if it's a gas giant more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined. 

One reason not to be jolly: what looks in photos to be a big red eye. It's not the result of excessive interplanetary partying, but a centuries-old storm bigger than Earth.

And speaking of Earth, the only planet Holst omitted from his piece, today at 7:15 a.m. EST is the one moment of the year when most of its people are bathed in sunlight — an incredible 99 percent of us. A reason for jollity, to be sure. 

(Photo: Courtesy NASA)

Up in the Air

The crane seems like a stunt double from The War of the Worlds, a 100-plus-foot behemoth that takes up most of our suburban lane. It was brought in as reinforcement when two men and a chainsaw were unable to complete the removal of dead limbs from a lopsided oak last week. 

In a move that has gotten our carbon footprint off to a bad start for the new year, I'm afraid, the crane and two other large vehicles pulled up to the house early this morning. After 30 minutes of waiting for the crew to assemble, the real show began, duly recorded for two-year-old Isaiah. 

First, the crane operator slowly raised the contraption's arm, extending it high before swinging it over the neighbor's house to reach the troublesome tree. Next, in an act of derring-do seldom seen outside a circus, one of the guys who had been calmly putting on gear was hoisted up into the air. 

He hung suspended for what seemed like hours but was only a minute or two before reaching the tree, chainsaw swinging from his belt. A few minutes later, he was joined by another acrobat. Together they've been slicing the deadwood away from this (knock on wood) still-viable oak.

I write this post from the basement, the only sensible place to be. I can hear the grinder machine whirring. Most of the branches are down, I think. The show is almost over. 

(I generally prefer horizontal shots, but this post cried out for a vertical.)

Solstice Miracle

The low light was shining directly into my eyes during part of today's trail walk. But it's all part of the package on the shortest day of the year. 

For some reason now, as I write this post, a funny little glob of a rainbow has appeared. I don't recall seeing anything like it before: an ordinary sky except for one cloud bleeding yellow and orange light.  We've had no rain; the sun is lower in the firmament. 

I'm sure there's some sort of scientific explanation. But I'm going to consider it a solstice miracle.

(P.S.on February 2, 2023: I just learned that my "solstice miracle" is called a sundog.)

Last-Minute Light

Yesterday was rainy and gray from start to almost finish. At 3 p.m. it was dark enough that I had to check the clock to be sure it wasn't 5. 

But only minutes from sunset, the clouds blew away and left a window for the light. It slanted in clear and bright and contained, more like the illumination from a half-shaded window than one thrown off by our nearest star. 

I've seen this phenomenon before, this last-minute light. Some days it feels like a reprieve, other days a cheat. But it's hard to complain when it leaves an afterglow like this.

What Might Be

I begin the day with moonlight, a bright waning gibbous that cracks a sweet gum branch in two as I glance at moon and tree through this window I call my own.

How companionable it seems, this moon. Not the cool, pale orb of rounded perfection, but a heavenly body that looks at bit battered around the edges. Knocked down, but still there. 

Meanwhile, daylight is gaining on it. Soon it will fade to a translucent disc. The sun will rise, strengthen, send shards of light through the prism, make rainbows on my wall.

But I'm starting early, in the cold darkness, and this is just a glimpse of what might be.  

Loud and Low

When the winds howl, the planes fly loud and low over the house. I snapped this photo yesterday while on a breezy walk. 

Throughout the length and breadth of the neighborhood I was the only soul out for a stroll.

Call it cabin fever or just plain stubbornness. Whatever it was, it put me in place to snap this shot. 

The Moon

The moon was with me this morning as I drove to the airport, so early and so long ago now that it seems like another week. 

And the moon was with me later, a pale disc as I zoomed down I-66 on my way to school.

The moon is with me still, in this photo (not a very good one, I'm sorry to say), growing ever brighter as I walked through a darkening campus on my way to class.

The moon will be full tomorrow ... but it's hard to see how it could be any fuller.

All the Light

Now that winter is settling in, it's decided to give us another dollop of snow to freshen up the batch we received on Monday. Which means I've been scanning the clouds.

Yesterday we had a swirled and mottled firmament, a stingy winter sky. Though it was a montage of clearing and melting, the sky kept its distance. 

At about 3 in the afternoon, between errands, I looked up and thought: This is all the light we're going to see. It's a sober realization but also a practical one. In weather, as in life, it's good to know what you have. 

Looking at Clouds

This morning I awoke to the house at rest, a house that somehow held 22 people for a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. 

An outside table was pulled in, borrowed chairs were tucked under it, and the best china was pulled from its sleeves, dusted off and actually used.

Today, I could do some Black Friday shopping, I could catch up with classwork .... or, I could do what I most want to do, which is to look out my office window at clouds scudding across the sky. 

Marine Layer

Sometimes it seems as if you could will away the marine layer that cloaks this city in the morning, that by walking up and down the hills, through parks and intersections, past coffee shops and markets you could build up enough heat to part the clouds and let the sun shine through.

That's the way it felt this morning, as I ambled down Pike to Alaskan Way, and headed north ... toward Alaska.

I didn't get that far, of course. Only to Myrtle Edwards Park. But by the time I hiked back up the hill to the hotel, the sun was shining. 

Blue Sky

In group meditation, we are visualizing creativity as blue sky and a spark of clear spacious light that expands and grows until it covers the universe. 

This is easier said than done. Into the mind comes the grocery list, the calendar, the need to notify team members that I'm off today. Blue sky vanishes behind clouds of my own silly making, which is what it always does. Because clouds are almost all of my own making. 

But today I'm stepping away from calendar and duties, hoping to spend as much time as possible outside, under the real sky, which is, as it turns out, mostly blue today.

Up in a Tree

Oh, how I love to climb up in a tree

Up in the air so blue

I do think it the pleasantest thing

Ever a guy could do

Scaling the trunk and sawing the branch

Till I can see all 'round

Hoping I'm belted and harnessed all right

So they'll catch me if I fall down!

Till I get back to the Earth again

Back where the chipper chips

The homeowners cheer when I'm in the clear

Don't they know, I never slip?!

(With apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson.)