#Write31Days: 12 • sky

Tuesday 11 October: sky

Carl Sandburg says, "I tell you there is nothing in the world. Only an ocean of tomorrows, a sky of tomorrows." Williams Faulkner reminds us how the past keeps overtaking us minute by minute, so it's as here and now as it ever was there and then. In case, in every case, the sky above us is vast and limitless and endless. God made a firmament and declared it good. The commentator asks, "what's a firmament?" Beyond the heavenly canopy above us as a sort of unit of measurement – boundless, endless, etc. – more than anything the sky is a wonder. Tucson is an astronomical dark sky area. Look up in the sky! Lie on the city roof bak on Clark Street. Not nearly as many stars to see as out in the country, but the stars, the night, the moon, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus planets all proclaim a Creator. Who is not us, to echo Tucson poet Richard Shelton in his Totem,

while it is still night
with morning around the edges
I will take the face of dawn
in my hands and say it

surely if I can tell anyone
I can tell her
that I have found
the gods and discovered
I am not one of them

The Sky. Blue serenity, thunderclouds. Funnel clouds. North Atlantic skies brewing up a storm over earth, on land.