Why I Gape at the Dramatic Expanse of the Sky
with a madman's love, with a fool's awe
Last week, I wrote about the little things called stationery that assist us in our life. This week, let’s move to bigger things, from erasers to Milky Way stars, journals to the moon, let’s drag our marker all the way to Jupiter. These ginormous celestial bodies don’t fit in a pencil box, but dance against the dome we call sky, a theatrical stage that hangs upside down, above us at all times, beckoning us to take a peek.
The actors of sky theatre keep changing. The sun is a predictable protagonist, empowers tiny leaves to get cooking in the morning, and leaves a little blush behind when lovers kiss at sunset. The moon is forever a muse, a daytime flat gibbous is as charming as the bulging full moon on Buddha Purnima. Birds and airplanes make for good junior artists, and the rainbow is a complete showstopper. Clouds, however, form the most versatile members of the sky theatre cast. They are wispy and gliding with joy or dark and looming with threat.
The drama of the sky is endless.
And yet, most of it goes unnoticed. People working and living in skyscrapers don’t have the time to look up at the sky. A house is measured in the square feet of its floor area, not the amounts of sky visible from its balcony. People walking on the streets of a city like Mumbai can access it only as a reflection in a muddy puddle. You’d think only poets and painters are looking up at the sky anymore.
Ron Ranson, famous water-colourist, wrote that even painters at times paint the sky as an afterthought, whereas the sky dictates the mood of the painting. While reading ‘Ron Ranson on Skies,’ I learned two things. First, the light in a sky painting is created by an eraser! Second, we need many more colours than ‘blue’ to paint the sky. My mother, a painter before marriage, would point at the evening sky with enthusiasm, “Look Raju! If I used pink while painting the sky, people will call me crazy! But when God colours it pink nobody questions him!”
She was a science student, yet preferred art and God to express her delight about the pink sunset. I remember standing on the terrace of my childhood, when I watched a rocket make a white needle on the sky. One summer, my father carried our cotton gaddas on his shoulders, climbed four flights of stairs up to the terrace, just so we could sleep under a cool sky. Today, my 5-year-old nephew can spot a faint moonrise before anyone else. The sky has been around, or above, me throughout my life, but I keep forgetting it exists.
In times of depression, while struggling to find an identity, gazing up at the sky was a heartmending activity. To gape at the sky was to zoom out of my wounds, from the small city that is my un-homely home, even from the country of suppressed emotions and unleashed hate, up and up and up until I realised that our earth is but a pale blue dot in the universe, and till the time I don’t know who I am, being an ‘earthling’ will suffice. While I still suffer from my neglect of nature, sky included, I find myself desperate for sky gazing breaks, especially in the winters when the sky is lit for a shorter time.
The body-pierced night sky is not as appealing to me, with nights still unsafe for women and polluted with artificial light. And yet, a few times when I force myself to step out, to buy eggs and milk for next day’s breakfast, I bump into the moon, and forget everything for a second. Once in a blue moon, I spot the Orion and smile.
Orion is the only constellation I know of. In fact, I am largely illiterate in the language of the sky. I can’t distinguish between a nimbus and a cumulus cloud. I’ve never touched a telescope. If you were to join me in my sky gazing, I would not offer any exciting piece of trivia. I will be as silent as the sky. I am not a poet like Goethe who wrote poems on clouds, or a sky-painter like Ron Ronson, nor am I an astronomer like Ptolemy who was so mesmerised by the sky that he arrived at the mathematical model of the universe. I don’t do anything productive with the sky, neither science, nor art. I gape at it with a madman’s love, I stare at it with a fool’s awe.
Why do I watch the sky with an open mouth? How do my illnesses evaporate when I look up at this ultimate umbrella? First, the sky becomes a meditation teacher. It instructs me to treat my inner weather to be as transient as the mid-morning clouds. The clouds are to the sky what thoughts are to my mind, and what sensations are to my body. Even when the sky turns charcoal, thunders, and cracks up like an egg, it doesn’t break.
Next, the sky does a kind thing by staying far from us all. While it gives us company on terribly lonely days, it doesn’t allow us to touch it. And it would be sad to touch it, like it was for Truman from The Truman Show, to find a door in the sky, a fake sky. The real sky teaches how to love what is far. You can’t manipulate the sky or control it. By maintaining its boundaries, the sky inspires me too to become a free canvas. Right now, I am more like the complex code of a malfunctioning app, so the skyward journey is light years away. Until then, I can always look up, and take a sip of the sky.
Loved loved reading this...will be returning to reread:)