When we contemplate, we gaze into space. When we pray, we look up at the sky. We enter the inner scape when we dream. We laugh out into the air, doubling up or falling back. When we breathe, we breath in and out the void. When we sigh, we let go of a piece of us into the blue. When we go star gazing or bird watching, or just out in the drizzling rain or snow, we look at that which is made visible due to the luminous emptiness of the sky.
A thousand rituals are connected with giving gratitude to this element that resides within us and outside us in the form of endless spaciousness. There are Dakinis said to be dancing out there. Spiritual guides. It is this space that helps us put our words and feelings across, both in the poetic sense and in the literal, technical sense. It is this invisible network on which we send thought-letters to each other.
And when Charles Baudelaire said, “Music fathoms the Sky”, he would have also seen that it is the child fathoming the mother, the emptiness behind. There’d be no words, no books, no music, no poetry and day dreaming, no communication of any sort, no us–not even this illusion of existence, if there wasn’t this emptiness from whence it all springs.
To the Void that looks upon us as the Sky goes our expansive breath of gratitude. Here’s to looking up at it and across it, sitting below it and sleeping under it, and setting out in all directions, flying, discovering, learning, getting drenched, and planting and harvesting, and growing tall and free.
“The sky is daily bread of the eyes.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whom we echo with all our hearts full of the sky.
Imagine the azure skies. Imagine music playing on trees swaying in the breeze at dawn. Johann Strauss II, the Blue Danube Waltz. Imagine a garden of forking paths upon the horizon, where our lives meet with other lives, crisscrossing at the right tangents. So right that they couldn’t be otherwise. And like fireflies blazing with dreams, hopes and desires, we burn bright patterns on the void, faultless and intricate, roping our many selves into an eternal waltz. Flame to flame, the greater invisible consciousness transfers what one needs, moving forward with each breath. How does that happen? It needs no words. Time evaporates in its palm made of awareness. Space melts in its embrace of oneness. And, like butterflies made of ‘knowing’, the right messages and messengers burst through this electric heart across to ours. Love, pain, lessons, joy, growth, purpose, passion, strength, a new direction…everything just drops through in the exact spot and at the exact time it is required, just as we go on dancing, dizzying ourselves with the experience of life.
Breathless with rapture, we kneel to those million messengers coming to us through this vibrant space: partners, friends, stories from those who are part of space now, symbols ancient and new, strangers passing by, all who tell us their secret, letting it slide under our skin. Softly. Serendipitously. Through the paths of intuition. Reminding us of eons of exchange and reciprocity. They appear as words on a billboard. Or a line in a coffee stained book. Or a picture on someone else’s room. Or a damp shape on the wall. Or strange forms in the clouds. And in a eureka! of art or literature or science. A flash of lightening. Or in the much awaited rain. In the smell of narcissus. Or a phrase of music. And calendar art, t-shirt logos, bandanas. And through telescopes and microscopes. In backpacks and yoga mats. And animals of the wild or of the air, or in one’s lap. Or simply, in someone’s gaze from across the street. In a pat on the back. A waving hand through the window of a passing car.
To these sky messengers, these billions of synaptic, shapeless gurus, we kneel. We love this dance.