Inhale – like moisture rising through the soil pores to meet the sky. Hold. You are a cloud now. Exhale – like raindrops sprinkling to bathe the earth.
One weekend eve, I found myself underneath the open skies, legs crossed on a green yoga mat and fists clenched as a symptom of ‘smartphone withdrawal’. The week had been tough on me. Yet, I emboldened my shoulders and looked up. Sunlight was serenading the sky. Like Marigolds, it bloomed in the air. It touched the clouds in a show of assertive intimacy. The clouds blushed. They turned pink. In the North, something bright winked at me. ISS – the brightest object in the sky next to our sun and moon – tirelessly passed over my head for the hundred-thousandth time. I let go of my rigid posture and slouched back to catch more of the romance, to feel the east doze off and witness the west wake up. My bones were feeling the uneasiness in my thoughts, and the mat was too short for me to rest all of them; I had to either bend my knees or tilt my neck to fit in. So, I tilted my head and stretched my legs. Relief. The evening was slipping beyond the horizon. And while I was playing Eenie, meanie, miney, moe between knees or neck, a floating turtle tried to sneak past me, but I looked back up in time. Clouds. They look and move slowly like a turtle but they are as fluffy as a hare. I bet if you look at the clouds now – or anytime, no rush – you too can spot a turtle. There’s always a cloud that’s shaped like a turtle… or maybe turtles are shaped like clouds; think about it.
It feels eerie to think that we’ve been staring at different skies our entire lives (it is true if we call the outer space visible from the earth sky). I can recollect a memory of seven-year-old me staring at the sky. Although, it was not quite the same gaze as it was this evening. I, a naïve, self-centered kid, believed the centre of the earth was right above my head (Don’t blame me, I had empiricism on my side!!). It took me two educative decades plus one tough week to gradually realise that it’s centred above everyone so it’s above no one in particular.
I wonder what ‘sky’ would mean to a seven-year-old born and brought up on the ISS. Where’s the center? I want to ask her, with uneasiness in my arched neck. But I don’t move a bone. I surrender to the expansive sky.
Another perspective challenging anecdote: seven-year-old me asks my grandfather, “What are those crooked chains of bright dots that I see in the sky when I squint?”, my hand stretched far out over the yellow parapet wall of the building. My grandfather in white, with his veiny hands behind his back and head lost in ancient thoughts, sagely replies, “scissors.” It took me two knowledgeable decades plus 0.86 seconds on the internet to realise it’s called Scheerer’s phenomenon, and it’s caused not in the sky but inside one’s eye. What happens is the WBCs coursing through the retina don’t absorb light (because they are white, duh.) thus creating the aforementioned illusion of crooked chains of bright dots in one’s vision. Guess he, my grandfather, didn’t want me going ‘bright dot chasing’ off the roof, so he named something sharp, dangerous, and mundane like scissors… Or he didn’t want his seven-year-old curious grandkid to hang out to dry without an answer … Or he just blurted the first thing that came to his mind.
I wonder what ‘down to earth’ would mean to a seven-year-old born and brought up on the ISS. Where are your roots, in the stars? I want to ask, but the sky’s still auburn here in my eyes; the clouds blossoming like the lovechild of cotton candy and magma.
Lately, I have read a few books that planted in my brain a skepticism about our depreciating relationship with the natural world, and it made me look for the reasons. It had suffered, of course. To us, it feels stupendously marvelous to boast about our lives being blessed by immense digital advancement. We (millennials) were born crying alongside the beep-beep and toot-toot of landline telephones. Now we have grown young to smartphones that know us down to our last bit (binary. Wink wink). This is the golden age, we tweet. It’s important to grow over this delusion because a stone-age man with a bow on his back and flintstones in his hands thought his life was lit AF too. But forgive me for the rant. I did not write this book to sound nostalgic. The sole purpose of this book is the same as ours: obvious sometimes, sometimes undiscovered.
Now, here, the sun is beyond my sight. It’s not utterly dark yet. But the only thing I think I see now is either crescent moon or scissors in my eyes. Bands of colours painted across the horizon are getting darker as the brush that has painted them moves further up the sky. Fluffy turtles that have turned into dragons now are shimmering like gold on waves of light which are the last rays of the day for us. The sweet wind has resumed, and trees know it.
It’s funny – and I was amused – how clouds provoke different emotions in different people. Look up. Think about it. What do they feel like? Does it calm you? Does it fill you with gratitude? Does it tickle? Does it make you jealous? Small? I asked some friends the same question. One replied, “hm”. It was not a contemplative ‘hm’ with a finger on the chin like, “hmmm”. No, it was an ‘I am too old and flustered to talk about it, but I’ll respect your gesture’ hm. Another one said, “I love them until they don’t turn grey” (sounded like something girls say about my hair). Another one texted, “They remind me of cotton pillow quilts from the bedroom of my childhood”. A friend added, ‘they looked even better when you are flying’. Putting his phone aside, a concerned one asked “Are you alright?”
For a while, I stayed at an apartment on the fourth floor of a building by a busy street. People seldom looked up from their phones, I noticed. I swear I could have stood naked and not one man would have ever noticed (oh dear, the attention issues bubbling inside this guy). When you look up, you open yourself to infinity. Like the dinosaurs who looked up at the asteroid and said, “Fuck!”. Because, maybe, that’s how we became. Our arrival. Sky has been an answer to our questions and looking up has been the only way to ask. It’s the playground of a nascent mind; a whiteboard. Don’t believe me? Ok. You religious? Where does God reside? You a man/woman of science? Where are your telescopes pointed? You a hedonist? Doesn’t pleasure elate you ‘higher’?… A flat earther? Where’s my middle finger pointing?
I have always heard that sky’s the limit. But what is the sky? Where does it begin and end? Is it something merely scientifically defined? Is it just the air above us? Is it only a panorama of the distant? In answer, it is whatever you see when you look up. It is peace and abundance, mystic and divine. It is a way out and a way in. A common roof above us all. It is a shroud, a curtain between us, the passionately sinful mortals, and our stern gods of the universe. If you don’t believe me, look up!