Sky

The sky is full of amazing presence and possibility, precisely because of its enduring absence. Our perception of its presence which so beautifully holds our gaze, whether illuminated by starlight, or when drenched by daylight, is enabled only by the borders we can actually see that are not it, the perception of an illusion we continue to name and entertain, as if everything we encounter in this life, even the invisible, including the cloaked, together with the absent, must be named, a taxonomic impulse of rational creatures that has an ironic tendency to distract us from enjoyment of the very thing named. Clouds, by contrast, enjoy the sky through a different sort of relation. Quietly, softly, clouds commune with the sky, playing, morphing, and naturally becoming along the way. The sky, in turn, graciously welcomes their levity, one of the few actors allowed to enjoy the intimacy of the celestial. Helios by day, and Selene by night, along with their compatriots, clouds and comets, avian and astrological, shooting stars and distant spheres, are positively engulfed in negative volume, a secret gift of the sky, seldom noticed by most, the blessing of these objects’ observable presence wholly because of the void that envelops.

What would it be like to mimic the sky? To make more room, and invite space, for space itself? Do we fear the void? Or perhaps we are endlessly attracted by the opposite—stuff, things, and concrete possessions? The emptiness that is the sky invites an alternative for us to consider, a way of being, characterized less by clinging and more by detachment, filled with an abundance of absence, which is the essence of possibility, and doula to a new form of presence, one that embraces rather than eschews uncertainty, novelty, and open-endedness as fundamental features of life that are not meant to be erased but enjoyed.