The Sky! The Sky!

 The sky has been amazingly beautiful this September.  Every day it seems I just want to pause and hope that its breathtaking perfection will seep into my every pore like the air I breathe. This sense of perfection is present much of the time, not just at the sunrises and sunsets, which have been profoundly lovely, not necessarily spectacular, but often with a hauntingly quiet play of color and light. I cannot pinpoint the difference; it is more than the lack of humidity, more than the flatter angle of the Autumnal light, more than the clouds themselves. 

Perhaps it is just something in me that has changed.  Perhaps the sky is as it has always been, perfect in its own right, but I have only recently slowed enough to really notice it, really absorb its beauty.  Perhaps this is the natural progression of my attempts to slow down, to be present in my walks, to see the small things that surround me every day. Perhaps I am only now taking time to say "This, this alone is enough".  Perhaps I am only now giving myself permission to be a person who is content to occasionally step off the treadmill of constant striving and to celebrate simply having and being enough.

I don't really know the answers.  I don't really need to know the answers.

I've tried to take pictures, but my cellphone does not capture what my eyes see.  Or perhaps it does, and the camera does not capture what my brain interprets my eyes as seeing.  It doesn't matter.  One morning I hypothesized about bringing my big camera out, setting up a tripod, and trying to capture the light.  But I realized that the process of trying to record what I saw would only mean that I would lose the experience of seeing.  It does not seem worth the price. Far better to accept and remember than to lose the moment altogether.

The photo at the top of this post, a quick snap while Tikka was occupied with some scent or another, is the closest I have come, and I have since stopped trying.  The light near the sunrise is too bright, but the reflection of the light in the clouds seems to almost capture that almost painterly beauty, that sense of something so perfect that it cannot be real….. except that it is.