Sky Time

This past Sunday, I spent the afternoon in the woods. I sat beside a creek and let my ears wander into the layers of sound, untangling the loud roaring of the water downstream from the almost indetectable humming of the water by my feet. I tend to give the water credit for the sound, but surely the rocks deserve an acknowledgment. What is that roaring and humming, after all, if not the here-and-now song of oh-so-slow geologic change?

I climbed up from the creek bank and into the forest, where I lay down on my back (no chiggers, thank goodness) and gazed through the greening canopy to the sky. It was brilliant blue, with thick white clouds sailing past. They moved with such speed, their shapes so varying, and I had to remind myself that the blue sky above the clouds wasn’t moving with them, though it seemed to—that the blue is always there, bright and brilliant, whether or not the clouds part to reveal it.

I alternate between cloud time and sky time. Sometimes, my thoughts and feelings are wholly determined by the winds and whims of the moment. Somedays, I am fogged over, dull and gray. But then there are moments, when my soul settles below the rush of thoughts or soars above the turbulence of clouds, and everything is still and clear and utterly brilliant.

From that place of stillness, I don’t mind the mad rush of clouds, nor am I troubled by the seemingly geologic pace at which my body is healing from long Covid. From this place of calm and clarity, I am a blue sky, capable of holding innumerable clouds without losing a single photon of light. I am a stream, singing my way around obstacles, patiently polishing the roughest of stones.

When I rolled to my side to sit up, I found a fossil next to me on the ground. A sea plant, it seems, a few hundred million years old, uncovered by recent rain. 250-million-year-old fossils feel amused, I am sure, when I fret over a year’s worth of illness. But I forgot to fret for quite some time, what with the infinite sky overhead and that older-than-Adam plant in my palm. It’s a lovely thing to feel so young—an infant, surrounded by infinity.

And that’s what we all are: young and new. Much too young and new to allow our hearts to grow stale. Too young and new to give up the capacity to see the blue above the clouds. Too brand spanking new to lose the imagination that can guide us through the layers of earth and into the vast story of which we are just a tiny part.

What helps you to feel young, new, fully alive? What connects you with the vastness of this world, of which each of us is a part?  

P.S. I’ve got a few pretty cool things in the works for you, though they are moving along at something resembling geologic time—a Corona Cafe podcast (featuring interviews with fellow long-haulers), as well as virtual forest bathing for long-haulers. I hope to have more details for you in the coming weeks!

P.P.S. As always, thank you so much for being here with me! If these emails are helping you in your journey, please share them with a friend, post to social media, write a comment, reply to this email, click the heart, or buy me a coffee.