Sky · 6:25am Dec 4th, 2015

I like to wonder sometimes.
It’s a bit strange.
I mean the sky.
But what is the sky?

Lying down on grass, cement, anywhere above the underground,
We can see it.
And it is most commonly blue,
Maybe red at times,
Purple if you’re lucky,
Grey if you’re unlucky,
And if you believe some people, green.

And inky black at night.
And the clouds are shades of grey and white,
But never black.
Except at night.

And pitch white according to Olber’s paradox.
It’s an interesting one.
It involves space.
And stars.
And distances.
And oddly enough, gravity and relativity.

But I mean it’s strange.

It’s like we have a hole above our heads.
A hole.
Imagine that.
A hole the size of the sky.
Except it is the sky.
It’s like living in a house with no roof.
But we’re fine with it.
And we have been for a long time.
But if it’s a hole,
Then shouldn’t we be able to climb out?

But the thing is, is that there are no walls.

The opening is a very nice opening,
I must say,
Entertaining us with wispy, white clouds by day
Entertaining us with bits of light by night
And killing us whenever it gets a bit rowdy.

I wonder how many holes get to say that they have mood swings?
I wonder how many holes get to say that they’re mathematically impossible.
I suppose if you’re having a particularly boring day,
You could set out to prove it and succeed.
But that’s being stubborn.

Or maybe it’s the other way around
And we’re at the top of the hole.
Or the peak of the hole.
You know,
The little bit where you realize that you’re about to fall into it,
And what we think is the top is actually the bottom
And we’re meant to fall out.

But that begs the question.
Where do we fall out to?

But we only fall into holes
Because of gravity.
What if what we think is gravity is not us falling down holes,
But us falling out of holes?

Imagine that.
Imagine a white dot where things are being pushed out.
And fold that into itself.

What happens?
The things start to hit each other and begin to coalesce.
And you get a ball…

Guess what that is?
Earth!

But that’s not how it works.
Sadly.
Or maybe not.
We’d have been dead long ago.
For that matter we’d probably have to live in the crust
To survive the constant bombardment of stuff.
Would’ve been cool though.
Entirely different evolution.
Maybe the top of the underground would be our sky then.
And maybe we would build rockets with drills on top to explore the outside?

Instead of stars,
We’d have geodes.
Instead of clouds,
We’d have monstrous worms tunneling.
Instead of rain,
We’d have dust.
Maybe our bodies would be different.

Would we be happier?
Or sadder?
Under this sky?
I don’t think so.
One can’t be sad about what they never knew, right?

But the sky is very difficult to get to.
And gravity doesn’t work that way.
We don’t get pushed into holes,
We get pulled into them.
I suppose that destroys the underground theory.
But what do we get if we pass it?

Planets.
Stars.
Impossible things.
Or maybe every single possible thing.

We have landed man on the moon.
Which is in space.
And theoretically, Space is higher than Sky.
In our point of view.

We like breaking limits right?
That’s why we call the sky the limit, right?

Maybe that’s why,
It’s always been fascinating.
Watching birds fly.
In the sky naturally.

I’ve always been a bit envious of their natural ability to explore the sky.
Bit strange isn’t it?
There’s almost nothing to impede them up there,
But they always land.

Maybe it’s because of gravity?
That pulling force
That’s not actually quite pushing?

Or maybe because the sky’s not very interesting,
So birds land?

I don’t know.
I’m not a bird.
But if they don’t find it interesting,
Why do we?

It’s just always so high.
So empty.

And that makes us wonder,
What could we do?
What can we do
If we just get high enough?

And so we fill it up.
With possibilities.

But it’s also strange.
When we fill it up,
We lock possibilities
And get possibility.
Singular naturally.

And people complain.
Also strange.

The birds aren’t bothered,
Strange to me.
They should be the ones
Bothered the most.
It’s their sky.
But their domain has just been invaded by strange mountains built by us.
But they just fly around it.

Maybe that’s why people complain.
Because we’re jealous of the birds
And want to bother them a little.
But when they aren’t bothered,
We get bothered
By little birds not being bothered by us
Trying to bother them with bothersome things.
So we blame other people.

But the sky’s just so big.
Infinitely big.
Maybe that’s why the birds aren’t bothered.
They know that there is room for us up there too.

I wonder if the birds ever look down at us silly humans
And laugh,
Look at these humans,
Some build to join us,
Some laugh at the builders,
Some destroy what the builders have built and cry.
Look at these silly humans.

And just fly away into the vast open sky.

The sky is high too.
How high?
High enough to have mysterious clouds.
Oh, we know they’re made of water,
Or are they?

Maybe they’re monsters?
Or maybe not monsters,
But insects that live high in the skies,
Sick of the silly things we get into.

Maybe they hide great castles
For dragons to live in
And Adventurers to explore?

Maybe the pegasus still fly amongst them
Along all sorts of fanciful creatures?

Or maybe they’re just water.
Steam.
Still left over,
Or maybe still being created
In an ongoing fight between fire and water?

Could one drown in a cloud?
Or could it be the greatest architectural structure?
Suspending hundreds of tons of water at unknowable heights?

Or maybe we do know the heights?

If we were to look from outside,
Which we have,
It’s basically a sphere.
Which is kind of like a Mobius strip
In the fact that it has one side.

But it gets boring looking at it from one side.
So we broke the skin.
And get to space.

And look back.
And find what we thought was blue,
Was starry,
Was black.

Was invisible all along.

But we can’t breathe,
So we head back.
And lie down somewhere.
Grassy, Cement, Somewhere.

And just gaze at the sky.
In its pretty Blue Cloudy dress
In its slinky Starry Night gown.
In its naked strangeness.
And just wonder.

I privately think
That sometimes we just miss looking at the sky.
We’ve seen it from the inside.
We’ve seen it from the outside.

And found we preferred the inside.
Or maybe because it’s the roof to out wall-less house?
Perhaps we like limits.

If so,
We’re a bit strange
To like something so strange.

It’s all a bit strange, isn’t it?
All of it.
Of colored skies and mysterious clouds,
Of holes that pull and holes that push,
Of planets inside out and a sky of stuff,
Of stars and moons and men who dance with them all,
Of birds fly around fake mountains,
Of floating castles and their dragons being explored by small adventurer’s,
Of simple things being thought too much in too long ways,
Of wandering wanderers wondering little wondrous things.
But it’s all strange in a beautiful, wondrous way.

You know…
You should do this sometime,
Look outside sometime, somewhere.
And start thinking.
Just like I have.

It’s the sky,
But what is the sky?

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