Pondering the sky

Jenn in Holland wrote: "The weather today is ideal. It is a mild seventy-five Fahrenheit degrees outside with faint wispy clouds high in the sky. The sky is that perfect crayola color. You remember the one, a perfect sky blue. As a child it was the color I chose to complete my house drawings, scribbling an inch of azure across the upper edge of the page; an interpretation of the big bright blue sky I saw outside."

When I was in the second grade, Miss Spencer told us that nobody could color in the sky except Wilma. I was outraged! I have no idea why a teacher would say such a thing, but I wondered why only Wilma's idea of sky was acceptable. Jenn in Holland did what so many children do, coloring in an inch of sky across the top, rather like the Hebrew concept that sky was that dome stretched overhead. And for Jenn, it was blue.

Because an inch of sky across the top of a page looked really weird to me, I started thinking about sky. What is it? Where is it?

Well, for starters sky is full of ... nothing! Sky is air. Sky is what I breathe. You can't see it, but it is everywhere there's not a something. So in the pictures of a house, a tree, maybe a car beside the house, and flowers along the side opposite the tree, then ALL that space left over was ... (gasp) ... sky!

Wait! First draw a line across the page and color the bottom of the picture green, for grass. THEN I could color everything above it blue for sky. Okay, so we can't see it, but when we look up the sky is blue. So by coloring very, very softly I can put sky around the tree, around the house, around the flowers, around every petal of every flower. Wow! Sky is a very important thing!

Yes, I know my way of thinking is a bit odd.

Thinking about the what-is-not is almost emblematic of my way of thinking. The sky in my childhood drawings was everything that was "not there," and even as an adult I was thinking about the space full of nothing.

One day I was sitting at the table beside the kitchen window, facing the back yard. A bird swooped past the window in a loop around the large tree and then maneuverered through the limbs of another tree. And I visualized the bird's pathway in a new light. The spaces between limbs formed a path only the bird could see. For me, looking out the window, the trees looked dense, but for the bird there was a path, open and inviting. I wondered if I could begin to think like a bird? Hmmmm.