Nature Memoir II

When you look up, what do you see? Haze diffuses the sun like a lampshade. In faint patches you can see just briefly the blue of the sky, yet it hangs high enough that the clouds float under them in the foreground. The wind is so still, how frozen in time the clouds become. Like snowflakes, how unique the tops of them puff out and upward, with each billow and roll and reach creating these definitive edges and shadows.

The bottoms of the clouds are so uniformly flat as if the knife of God had cleaved them off. And if you look hard enough, you can just barely see radiating swathes of light break brighter in the haze closest to the sun. And the one large bird who flies like a silent Icarus. A black triangle, bending and twisting. As you walk and stand, and stare, the passersby, how they don't seem to exist anymore. How you wish they were never visible at all. A passing glance towards you, a nod, a peculiar smile, and yet... you wish you were further away. Wandering in the meadow, with no soul to remove you or even slightly pull you from the sky immersion.

You become a plant. Unified with the earth, this shared silence, peace, and warmth that brings you energy and death simultaneously. Gradually, it feels like oblivion. The most peaceful oblivion, what everything you can find in nothing, how heaven is where you want it to be right here, right now, with that nothingness in everything that consoles you.

The equilibrium of all and none produced by simply looking at the sky. Not in the faces of people. Not in your frail body. Not in the wrinkles, the blisters, the voices and eyes and mere presences of the people, but the infinite, timeless, and forever-where of the very thing you stand upon and under.