“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” 

John Lubbock, The Use of Life
skies I have known

We attach little value to something common, such as the sky. Perhaps, because I was born and raised on the prairies, I have always been fully aware of and appreciated the skies above me. In fact, here on Vancouver Island, I found that living nearly two years in a home where I could not see the sky pushed me to bouts of despondency until we moved where I could once again openly see the sky. For some of us, the sky is as important and vital as water.

Kites decorating the skies over Parksville, BC

“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson
local deer on the beach under an exotic sky

The sky is an often ethereal and ever-changing canopy of nature. It goes from a clear blue to steely grey; to one filled with or wispy with clouds; to coral and apricot sunsets; to a dramatic night sky painted with Milky Ways, stars, and planets.

“In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.” 

Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Always looking up

“The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be? It is the same the angels breathe.”

Mark Twain

5 thoughts on “Skies I have known”

  1. the sky nourishes me too.

    “We are now approaching the region of clouds and cool streams. Magnificent white cumuli appeared about noon above the Yosemite region,–floating fountains refreshing the glorious wilderness,–sky mountains in whose pearly hills and dales the streams take their rise,–blessing with cooling shadows and rain. No rock landscape is more varied in sculpture, none more delicately modeled than these landscapes of the sky; domes and peaks rising, swelling, white as finest marble and firmly outlined, a most impressive manifestation of work building.” ~ John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

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