DEEP FIELD IMAGES OF THE NIGHT SKY IN RELATION TO THE REST OF MY LIFE

Some things you can’t really compare, but for reasons far beyond reach you feel you have to. It can help counterbalance your self-esteem to try realizing how insignificant you are here at the relentless pinpoint of existence. 

On the one hand, we have various local timebound methods of asserting self-significance: one true religions, material possessions, the pyramids and selfies, to offer just a random sampling, but those are small potatoes when you go deep field into the night sky with your mind wide. 

No one can wrestle for long with that reality; it surrounds us with countless lifetimes, a trillion generations wouldn’t begin to cover it. Within your own few decades you feel over time your life’s fabric stretching to its limit; your joints begin to tire at the continuous effort of being, as you physically prepare for your own reconvergence.

Historically, we have attributed these physical life changes to time itself taking a merely chronic toll; more lately in our new scientific version we blame it as well on our dwindling personal supply of telomeres, if you want to stick to that. Plastic surgery is no cure, bionics is no cure, downloading to a motherboard is no cure. There is no ‘cure,’ as there is no disease.

Let’s look up and face it: we are each and all destined to become one again with the entire night sky; what’s the problem with that? What could be more magnificent in scope, more exquisite in detail? What could be a more appropriate continuance to the mysterious yearnings of life toward the stars?

We can all imagine infinitely worse, and often do.

WHERE THE LIGHT PLAYS

This morning when I stepped out the door onto the deck on my way to some garden work I was surprised at how bright it was out there-- the light itself was different, then I looked around the corner of the house and saw that two of the paddies across the road had been flooded since yesterday.

Like the paddies downmountain, these were now as blue as the morning sky and as bright, and as I set to planting my own plants I thought about how every year around this time the entire mountainside becomes a mirror that remains as bright as the sky for a good while after all the paddies are flooded and the mountain becomes the sky's reflection, even at night when it fills with galaxies.

This goes on until the rice is planted, when the sky of the mountain greens with growth each day as the stalks replace light with life, the mountainside turning toward imperial jade at the pace of growth, the ambiance changing as well all along the days as the light travels at vegetable speed, which is quite a switch, and stirs calming perturbations in the spirit, itself a matter of light that takes much of its nourishment from beauty and transition.

The habituated mind as well is reminded, as it steps out onto the deck blithely thinking all to be just as it was, and so comes to re-realize reality. Which is beneficial, by and large, and happens often out in the countryside, where light plays and grows, like widening rings in water.

Rainbows All Day

The day looked like no surprise. It was cloudy and rainy like yesterday, the day before and the day after tomorrow, but at this time of year that's no surprise around here, as the fall of summer chills into winter over the brown, sleepy earth.

But then came a surprise at one point early in the gray morning, when I looked out the window grumpy at upset plans with more rain before my eyes, and saw the brightest, finest, clearest rainbow I've been privileged to behold in a looong time, right inyerface in the dark north, stretching in jeweled glow from lake to mountain, broad and intense as light alone can be in a perfectly faceted moment. There are few perfect moments of any kind, but this - magic in the darking rain and mood - it was like suddenly living more life than a moment ago.

The arch of colors we can see (and colors we can't see) was low to the ground from the angle of the sun, each tint clear, yet without distinct edges of beginning or ending - like the rainbow itself - of the sky, yet apart, without edges, like the colors as they came from gray sky somehow to red > orange > yellow > green > turquoise > blue > purple then sky again, journeys of light I saw as a performance, each color flowing into the next...

As the day went on and the air grew even darker, time after time I looked out the window with less and less dark a mood, and each time I looked  there was another skyheart rainbow out there in a slightly different place, the light itself in a fine mood, brightling all the way to dusk.

My rainbow quotient is filled now, and with no effort on my part, a reward for just looking out the window now and then into apparent gloom, with a kind of hope the sky gave me. Even telling of it brings smiles to granddaughter faces...

Rainbows all day will do that for you.

TIDES OF DAYS

   

The longer I've lived here, the more I've come to delight in that brief time of Spring when the wintered mountainside becomes more and more facets of blue sky as the paddies fill, until for a brief time before rice planting, from certain perspectives - like my front doorway - the sky is all over the ground.

Then come the little astonishments of lifetimes, like the early Spring morning when you walk out of the house into a mountain mist and behold upon that long watermirror the pale-green rows of just-planted rice shoots, stretching away into the soft wall of cloud right at your door... You can’t help but just stand there looking, letting the sight fill you with the miracle of magnificence just plain happening, in this day-to-day way.  

On the blue days, across that magic mirror glide the clouds that come sailing over the mountain like big baroque pearls, while hawks and swallows dive to snatch food from their reflections; at evening the calm of the mirror is broken into widening rings by a now-and-then rain, or rippled into memory by sudden evening breezes that shiver the silver light. 

From the morning train along the Lake, through Spring and Summer you can see the day-by-day changes all along the line, as the tides of days turn the land to sky that soon turns to rice leaves, the fields growing day by day into perfect levels of deep green blades that reveal the wind as they grow taller, until they begin to nod with the weight of their gold...

CROWS MAKE IT HAPPEN

The crows seem to be up to something-- They're flying outward from some cryptic crow center like the momentarily black spokes of some vast unseen wheel they know all about, each one calling back CAW, CAW as they wing outward, and when I look up again they've all disappeared from the wheelless blue that just hangs there in all eternity, silent and crowless as only a summer sky can.

Crows can do that with a sky.

RAINBOW CONTESTS

I love these autumny days of hingy weather when the sky puts on one cloud show after another, the whole big blue going all cumulo for a while, then getting horsetaily, then grayloomy then puffy again, and darkling as the winds rise and the rains go wild for a bit until the rainbow contests, when the leaves join in and start showing off too, all afternoon toward evening when the weather gets really ditzy, doesn't know which way to turn because its just so interesting being weather, you can do so much with heat and cold, watch this!, wind and calm, see that? rain and sun, whoa! which will it be, right to the minute so the wind is blowing now but it stopped raining - no wait, there's another rainbow - then it rains and is cloudy but no sunny and warm now cold and windy but calm at the moment and so on all the way into darkness but the sky doesn't sleep of course, for the sky it's 24 hours a day for eons

VERGING

The sky darkens, the birds call low in the still air, the islands are shapes barely visible in the lowering mist, like memories of islands that once were there... Errant brightness from the south intensifies the stillness here; the leaves hang limp, the trees themselves stand waiting, as if something important is about to happen... Nothing moves... The sky hangs... The dragonflies are all in hiding... The world around is one vast verging...

What stimulus to the spirit, that knows the verge so well...

FAR BEYOND MAJESTY

Late afternoon is the time of sky when the light is entering its golden phase, when the trees and grasses shine undaunted into the face of the sun, as if to say, in strong green words: I am a masterpiece. There is a great and unsung pride manifest in what we are pleased to think of as mere vegetation.

Then as sunset nears, all the air itself realizes the transition and rises over the sun-warmed lake, as the cooler mountain air floods down in replacement; the whole mountain, lit aslant by the hovering sun, becomes the bed of a vast river of cool air, rushing down in cosmic obligation. To sit in that river, feel that flood, after splitting firewood in the hot sun for two hours, is like whitewatering the grand canyon while sitting still, all in the country of the soul...

Those same dark leaves lift into paleness at the first touch of the downmountain winds and gleam white in the setting sun - clearly they have an old local relationship - they carry their vastness in their seeds...

The repose of the mountains in such settings as this, shaded green, gray and black in the summer evening sun and breeze, is often described as 'majestic,' but there is more in those ancient faces than aristocracy can ever aspire to; it's a matter of interaction with eternity, not immediate lineage or ambition.

Then when all the air is balanced at last, from out of the overmountain light come galleons of windblown pink clouds, sailing over the mountains as slowly and stately as on a tropical lagoon, wending across the calm of the sky toward unknown shores...

And when all up there is yet light, as the earth below grows dark and cool, the dragonflies enjoy the same calm air, their dashing silhouettes clearly visible -- way up in that silence they zig and zag in the way of their kind on glassine wings, like thoughts in a blue mind, with no aim but to be...

Then comes the full moon, laying her tapestry of light over the darkling land, revealing lineaments we are blind to in the day... who has not stood out in that vapor of silver, lain over all with the touch of a goddess, and not grown thereby?

We can do no better in our dreams...

IT WAS OF THAT NATURE

Late yesterday afternoon I was out watering the garden under a fine blue sky when I sensed a great rejoicing above me, a non-stop exaltation coming from the direction of heaven. I looked up and beheld in all that broad clear blue a single barn swallow, just one little swallow way up there, filling all that sky with happiness, chattersinging nonstop while looping and curlicueing in wide curves as though doing some ecstatic skywriting, executing aerodynamic maneuvers that made the Blue Angels look like kindergarten, and he just went on and on, rollicking and singing at the top of his talent, though there were no other swallows around.

Now I don't profess to know all that much about bird emotion, but I do know happiness when I see it, and this was a whole skyful of joy, emanating from one little aerodynamically perfect back and white feathered creature who was using every aerial broadcasting skill at his command to let the world know just how he felt; he was way happier than any lark I ever heard. Just goes to show how mood can change a whole environment.

He wasn't hunting for his dinner, he wasn't calling for a mate, he wasn't fending off intruders into his territory, he was all alone in his glee, frolicking, swooping and singing excitedly all over the sky for no reason that I could see; the only thing I could think he was singing about with such passion would have to be something like "I found a wife! We built a nest! My wife just laid two eggs! Two eggs! Two beautiful eggs!" It was of that nature.

SOMETHING AKIN TO SPRING

Freewheeling down the mountain these early mornings through the old dun landscape of winter - and in the old dun mindscape of winter - I suddenly sense a change ahead, something there... new... around the curve... the light on the leaves is different... I slow--

I round the bend, to behold a startling brightness laid out right on the ground where there was no such thing yesterday; "it's the same color as the sky," says my old dun mind, "with some sunlight and clouds in it..." it's a flooded rice paddy, the first of the year! And there's another patch of sky over there, shining on the dark earth... and one more there in the distance...

Each morning I go through the same new startle to the old winter mindscape as more and more patches of light are added to the quilt of sky piecing down the mountainside, day by day transforming the mountain into a creature of Spring-- and greenleaf summer to follow, nature willing.

There at the bottom of it all shines the Lake, aquamarine set among brown winter mountains and faceted with light in the same way as the paddies - dappled with clouds, now and then stippling in the morning breeze - and I feel in myself something akin to Spring, new life rising from a winter mind. In my day-to-day awakening, I too mirror the season and its sky.