A Blanket of Blue
When I was little my favorite thing was the sky. I don’t know any other way of saying it. I could elaborate but that wouldn’t do justice to my thoughts about it at the time. I didn’t know that the sky reflected some majesty of God’s, I couldn’t really remember the proper types of clouds, and I didn’t mean by the thought that my favorite thing to look at was the sky or that my favorite part of nature was the sky. Just that my favorite thing was the sky. That was what I meant and while I can’t say it so simply any longer, I still know what I meant. I walked home from elementary and middle school often in awe. I drew pictures of sunsets. I cried when we flew through a cloud on my first airplane trip (I had imagined them a bit more solid). For a while, I cried every time I went in an airplane because I couldn’t believe that I was part of the blessed sliver of the world’s population to get to see above the clouds. Ninety billion people have walked this earth, and I have stood on mountain tops and flown above the clouds, seen them from the top, and almost seen angels hosting elegant balls there, waltzing on celestial carpet.Why should I be so blessed?
My favorite thing was the sky. My favorite Psalm was Psalm 19, dedicated to the sky, and I wished on many birthday candles that I might be able to fly. Even as I review my current bucket list, I find myself amazed by how many of my earthly dreams have to do somehow with the sky. I hope to someday be in attendance of the world’s largest hot air balloon festival in New Mexico, and for about fifteen years now (again thanks to Jess), I have longed to go to Glacier National Park in Montana... to Big Sky Country.
These past few weeks I have been in Dallas, Texas, after spending the fall in New England. My friends there love the natural world and enjoyed my constant state of rapture as the trees lit up and the landscape, burst into flames, and then donned more dignified, elderly gold and purple, and finally brown as they let their leaves swish to the ground. As I prepared to go back to Dallas for the holidays, they wondered aloud how I would do in a city so void of beauty. I tensed a little, ever defensive of my homeland, but didn’t protest aloud. I wondered as well how it would be. I have actually often been thankful that I was from Dallas, because I assumed that my wonder at natural beauty in the world was owed in part to a relatively low standard set early on in the Metroplex. I have now come to see this as a completely unfair assessment.
When I am in Dallas, about 95% of what I see anytime I am outside is the sky. I am covered at all times by immensity, by a dome of blue, and the flat landscape is what gives this to me. We have no mountains soaring toward the sky. We have hardly any reaching trees. I love green, and I do miss it. But most of North Texas in humility bows to the sky, sinking and laying low in deference to that opens space. And I realized that while I loved the gifts of New England, I felt the absence of expansive blue, of rolling storms, and of sunsets bedecked in irrational color combinations. I love both the reaching trees and rocking, arching land, as well as the flat. But this is my home and so perhaps the beauty that first called to me, first beckoned me to my roof as a little girl, and to climb over fences and stand in fields, and to pause daily for sunsets in seminary, perhaps this beauty will always hold a special place in my heart.
I drove every day to work for the past two weeks into sun rises that made me want to get out of my car in the gridlock traffic and kiss the person next to me. To invite them to get down on their knees with me, and just look until they could see. Golden rays pouring though buildings, reflecting on faces, purple clouds and moon behind us. Unfortunately, the sunrises did not help my courtesy as an interstate traveler. I got honked at a few times for not going fast enough and for not keeping my eyes on the road.
And so I have wanted to write about that. To write praise for the Texas skies, and thankfulness for the sprawling flatness that makes that vision possible. This should be the last even semi-comparison I will ever make, for what is the point? Why hold the Rockies to the Boston Harbor or the Grand Canyon to Arches in Utah? But I do wish there were another word for flat (expanse? field? sprawl?) to describe Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, for the flat gives way to mountains of clouds and stars and storms in the sky and while I cannot climb them, when I have laid still and waited long enough, the sky has condescended to me, sweeping me and washing me and calling me into itself.
