I Believe in Looking at the Sky Everyday

In trying to develop any semblance of thought resembling a "This I Believe Essay," I just decided to start somewhere. My previous try took me toward describing my tea bag instead, so here is actually why I think the sky is so important...

I believe in looking at the sky everyday. By "day" I mean a 24 hour period. There are places I have lived, like rural Kansas, where this statement as a concept is absurd. How can you help it when "the sky" makes up 90% of the landscape directly in front of you at any given time? The only way to miss the sky is to make a conscious decision not to look anywhere. I believe, however, that most of us who lived there missed it - yep, missed the sky - as a direct consequences of not looking at it on purpose.

Now I live in Dallas as one tiny piece of a progressive and bustling sky-obstructing landscape. The sky is not in front of you, it is actually above you in bits like an elusive, rare bird occasionally singing, daring you to spot it. If you don't even try, you won't.

I believe in stratus, cirrus, and cumulus, in stars and galaxies, in the moon and setting and rising sun - and that every moment of every day is a brilliant new work of art (albeit sometimes various shades of gray) on a huge canvas completely accessible to every living being on this planet. It is abstract Impressionism, minimalism, realism - powerful beauty and mystery available to the wealthy and those in poverty, to every age, gender, village and neighborhood.

I believe the simple act of purposefully looking up lifts me out of my myopic, self-absorbed, familiar universe and transports me to mystery and beauty and a vastness that grounds me... One that reminds me of who else is in this gallery with me while simultaneously filling me with a throat-clenching gratitude that this is all here for me -
because I'm looking.


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