Nina MacLaughlin has a six-part series in The Paris Review about the sky, called Sky Gazing. The virus was mysterious, rife. Quarantined in her New England home, she looked out her window, and said, "I have been alone and in my aloneness I have started a relationship with the sky."
Day by day, hour after unending hour, the tedium of life shrinking to four oppressive walls, life suddenly empty of people, she looked up at what had always been there:
"The sky said, 'I am open.' And I knew: this was a place to aim my attention. Such is how relationships begin. It was no different with the sky."
The sky is right, is bright, is inside-of-a-clam-shell grey-white.
How do we look at the sky? For me, my eyes dart around— here? Here? Searching for a focal point, unable to accept the wholeness of the expanse, the cosmic spread. To only look at the sheer sweep, the blues and greys and whites, is to see it oppressively closely, to have nothing and nowhere to place your eyes until, at last— a cloud, passing leisurely by.
A slight terror— so used to the mind-narrowing confines of our screens and walls, the sheer expanse is either painted surface or yawning abyss. Its imposing indifference to our petty troubles, its placid presence, its call to open ourselves up. It commands us to accept the futility of conceptual understanding, the impossibility of pinning itself down, its ever-changing palette. Its calm dominion.
How terrifying a clear sky.
I want to train myself to look at the sky without squinting. I look at the sky and my problems seem smaller, pettier. The sky says, “I am here. I am being. I am who I am.” I want to always look at the sky.
Our mother is very ill and my sister and I are hang-gliding in Switzerland, the expanse of the Alps below us, sublime, unreal. We are guiltless because we are in the prime of our lives. We are guiltless because we are suspended in the air, the world below impossibly far away.
I am young and nimble and months away from being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. “Kat your stunts don’t improve because you think too much.” I’m trying, I'm trying. People throw me into the air and catch me. We are on a field. I am tossed dangerously up. Airborne, weightless. Upside down, I catch a glimpse of open sky—
Gravity plunges me down.
Beng and I are both depressed. Have been so for years. We are in town, waiting for a ride-share. He checks the car's location. The tiny car icon inches painfully forward. He tilts his phone, the screen goes white with reflected light, and "Look," I told him— a glimpse of cerulean sky on phone, an echo of clarity on an interminable journey.
I am in an airplane watching Singapore recede. I am in an airplane watching New York recede. Watching Boston recede. Stomach lurching with every pressurized ocillation of home/home. The view from an oval window documents the changing zipcodes of my skies.
Hello/ goodbye.
I'll see you soon/ never see you again.
In Singapore, there are so many high-rise buildings and soaring skyscrapers, that the sky is often seen through peeks and corridors, framed by roofs, awnings, abutments, and rain trees.
I tried to describe to my friends from much, much bigger countries, how unused I was to so much sky— New England skies and fields and orchards and endless highways. They looked at me with pity, incomprehension. Little frog, so used to her small well.
Cumulus clouds and altocumulus clouds, just higher up. Smaller, bite-sized. The blue of the sky has a way of calming my mind, whereas the pearl, silver-white colorlessness the Singapore sky often is, fills me with awe and terror. How can a sky be so lustrous, so banal yet otherworldly?
Painting the sky is hard. These young YouTubers with their soothing voices make it seem so easy.
Apply the watercolor, diluted cerulean or phthalo if painting fair weather, wet on wet. Then take a tissue and blot off the wet paint in the areas where clouds are supposed to be, freeing the paper's white. The results are wispy clouds. Cloud dimensions may be added with white or light grey gouache paint.
I stare down at my work in dismay— washed-out caricatures of the real, entrancing thing. My flat, childish skies.
Debilitating self-talk have been coming back to haunt me— “You don’t have true friends,”; “You are living a lonely, isolated life”; “You have wasted all these years”; “No one wants to hear about cheer”; “Yeah, you haven’t been exercising”; “Beng does everything for you”; “You are loveless and unloved”; “You’re oversharing again”; “Your work is so worthless."
But I am finding the abyss less cloying— the dismay and dread still acute, but tempered with compassion and wry humor. MacLaughlin, writing about where the sky ends: “Rise, fall, fall again, fall again, fall better. With each inhalation, we take the sky into our lungs.”
Fall better— fall with more grace, more kindness. “I’m trying”; “I am learning so much”; “I am enough”; “I have so much to be grateful for”; “The sky— look to the sky."
It is the first time I’m in Singapore on October 13, ever since the date scorched itself into my heart as the worst day of the year.
I didn’t make it down to the Garden of Remembrance, the columbarium where Mummy’s ashes are interred. Instead, I spent the day in bed, seeking comforting and familiar digital escapes, disengaging.
October 13 fell on the gloom of New England falls. My memories of Mum’s death anniversary were heavy, dark, grim, lonely. The windows are all shut. The trees have lost their leaves. The skies a threatening indigo. Heavy autumnal clothes. For the past seven Octobers, I do not leave the house, do not leave the bed.
Here, in Singapore, I am trying to articulate the difference— the windows are open, the air circulating, sunlight flooding the room. The portable fan softly roars. It is humid, sticky. And the sky— the sky— so fathomless, candescent— I hardly know when clouds ended and sky began.
Ilya Kaminsky, divinatory poet:
“how bright the sky (forgive me), how bright.”
The sky is a light phthlato blue, and the clouds are faint, gauzy.
I am learning to write about the sky. It is the patient gestation of days, months, of mornings walking Quinn to school, sitting on the balcony—better days, my hopeful mind whispers— falling into it, and squinting my way out. Attention begets attention. The hardest things in the world are the simplest.
I am still exploring Nina MacLaughlin’s sky series. She writes about the relationship of language to the sky, “It had to do with the vibration below the words, not the words themselves but the silent resonance behind them. The sky behind them."
Slowly, my work is shapeshifting, pieces connecting and disconnecting. Transitions are being made. I am beginning to see the slow, painful but fruitful joy of reading through my words, again and again. Each time bringing something new. Like the sky, each glance something different.
Things I know for certain: the earth is life and death; my daughter is so beautiful; the sky is so freeing, so terrifying. Everything else is subject to change.
[Sigh.]
I had made a pact with myself to churn something out for my cute newsletter every weekend.
But the deadline came and went, and still I held back.
“No one wants to read my writing about the sky," I said to myself.
"No one wants to read my self-indulgent, masturbatory rhapsodies about the sky," I groaned to Beng, kicking the blankets.
But far more interesting than self-doubt and private theatrics— something was off about this piece on the sky, some absence hadn't been addressed, some intolerable imbalance in its spindly structure— ("lyric essay?" please la kat.)
I searched the skies— looking out of windows, lying face-up in the garden, frowning ferociously into the firmament.
What was I missing?
It came to me when I was looking, not at the sky, but at the ground— transplanting seedlings into the earth, praying they would survive, knowing many won't.
I first came across the Buddhist concept of “the sky-like nature of the mind” while reading Sogyal Rinpoche's spiritual classic The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. He instructs, "[w]hat happens at the moment of death is that the ordinary mind and its delusions die, and in that gap the boundless sky-like nature of our mind is uncovered. This essential nature of mind is the background to the whole of life and death, like the sky, which folds the whole universe in its embrace."
Raw with grief, heartbroken, having just broken up with Christianity ("Illness shall not touch your household— just believe."), I decided to learn about Buddhism. Its emphasis on impermanence and change seemed a better, more solid sort of language to hold the unbearable weight of death and the freak caprice of living.
A meditation teaching goes: “A vast open sky of awareness, and then the cloud of a thought might arise. Allow the sky of your mind to observe the thought like a cloud floating gently by.” Teachings like these help the niggling, sticky, obsessive thoughts I have gently dissipate. I look to the sky and am surprisingly, miraculously, relieved of context, obsessions, and to-dos.
The beautiful imagery of “the sky-like nature of our minds” tells us that our minds can be vast and clear. Looking at the sky assuages the heart-pinch of anxiety, the threat of hyperventilation. It aerates the strangle of depression, breathes into grief and sorrow. It reminds me that the world is more spacious than I, with my limited senses, dare to believe.
Yet, even as I find comfort in the Buddhist confirmation that yes, everything dies, and impermanence rules the day, something about the language of non-attachment seems to dissolve at its edges, threatens to become mist. Swami Vivekananda says, "By non-attachment, you overcome and deny the power of anything to act upon you." But if nothing can act upon me, touch me, if I one day transcend all these earthly attachments—what, I wonder, is the point?
Sometimes, when I am trying to be present with suffering friends, or sitting with the heaviness of grief, terms such as "the sky-like nature of the mind" seems too removed from the ineradicable clutter of lived experience, the unnerving scale of earthly pleasure and loss. I don't know why I'm so surprised. The spiritual can only ever be conveyed in the abstract, metaphors and analogies as incomprehensible and capacious as the sky. Still, my language lately seems to keep coming back to earth and stalk, dirt and rot.
Looking at the seedlings I was transplanting, I realized: the sky is a place to place my attention, but not my life.
The sky is capricious, fair and menacing, but never messy. However splattered with different hues, it is faultless, exactly as the sky should look. Even if it's been raining more often, or the sun is unnaturally searing, no one looks at a sky and says, “this is aesthetically displeasing,” or "how flat, childish” or “what a hot mess." Discomfort doesn't manifest in the sky. It’s always immaculately arranged, its composition just right.
Having a relationship to the sky is more nebulous concept than experiential truth. Something was missing in this piece because the sky is never conflicted. If there is no conflict, there is no story. Mining the sky for a story seems teleologically beside-the-point. It has no structure, and therefore no narrative arc.
I held scattered journal entries about the sky and tried to impose order. I failed, rightly so. These fragments about the sky were resonant and I believed in them for a while but after laying them down they seemed as immaterial as the atmosphere I was describing. There is nothing to grasp, nothing to hold.
I don't actually have anything to say about the sky except: I look at it when life gets tough. The sky doesn't have much else to say to me either, except, "Breathe. Watch. Be." The sky reminds me that plot is sometimes inessential, narratives over-determined, and language is maybe just one big hallucination.
Or something. I don't know. Maybe I’m just circling around a certain capaciousness, trying futilely to capture it. I catch a glimpse of open sky, gravity plunges me down—
I blink, my hands soiled with the fragile, tangled roots of everyday.