(no subject)
I am sheltered.
The other day I was driving home from work in the sunrise. The world turns into Brigadoon for all the fog, so not being a tourist I'm poking along Ocean Beach Road at 40 mph. As I'm rounding the corner of the last S-curve before my house, the forest ends and suddenly I'm confronted by this huge pink SKY. I've never seen such a sky. Ever. It was a time-traveling sky, one from the primordial Northwest, erasing the farms with the fog and growing the evergreens up farther into the sky, pushing their blackness farther up into the pink glow of sky. The Sistine chapel has nothing on this. Michaelangelo never painted anything like this.
Of course, it rained later.
That sky, though, got me thinking. When I saw that sunrise, all I wanted for that moment was to see the whole sky, from horizon to horizon. Something I've never seen before because, of course, that's not possible here. Anywhere I stand I can look up and see the sky, but only through a ring of trees. In my peripheral vision, the trees hold up the sky. I thought of the prairie, somewhere I've never been. Immediately I felt claustrophobic. Why? Because there's nowhere to hide. Endless sky, from horizon to horizon. Wide open spaces. Grass. It occured to me that the sky must look like Saran wrap, stretched from end to end over a bowl, pressing down on its contents.
Here, I feel my distance from the heavens and whatever it is that they contain. I'm not so much as a bug in a big glass jar, but a bug in a terrarium. Yet, whether I'm a bug in a jar or a bug under a tree, it remains that I'm still a bug who, for all intents and purposes, can be squashed wherever I am.
I am feeling a huge push in the direction of elsewhere. Travel. To get out from under my rock and leave the place where I feel most at home. I've never left here, not really. Twice I've left the Pacific Coast, 12 times I've left the Northwest. In my life. From making the step from Grays Harbor to Seattle, I've kind of claimed Western Washington as my larger home, and I feel sure that my stay here is almost up. For now, anyway.
(Forgive me if I dramatize, I've just finished reading epic literature, so my words are probably echoing the grandeur.)
The other day I was driving home from work in the sunrise. The world turns into Brigadoon for all the fog, so not being a tourist I'm poking along Ocean Beach Road at 40 mph. As I'm rounding the corner of the last S-curve before my house, the forest ends and suddenly I'm confronted by this huge pink SKY. I've never seen such a sky. Ever. It was a time-traveling sky, one from the primordial Northwest, erasing the farms with the fog and growing the evergreens up farther into the sky, pushing their blackness farther up into the pink glow of sky. The Sistine chapel has nothing on this. Michaelangelo never painted anything like this.
Of course, it rained later.
That sky, though, got me thinking. When I saw that sunrise, all I wanted for that moment was to see the whole sky, from horizon to horizon. Something I've never seen before because, of course, that's not possible here. Anywhere I stand I can look up and see the sky, but only through a ring of trees. In my peripheral vision, the trees hold up the sky. I thought of the prairie, somewhere I've never been. Immediately I felt claustrophobic. Why? Because there's nowhere to hide. Endless sky, from horizon to horizon. Wide open spaces. Grass. It occured to me that the sky must look like Saran wrap, stretched from end to end over a bowl, pressing down on its contents.
Here, I feel my distance from the heavens and whatever it is that they contain. I'm not so much as a bug in a big glass jar, but a bug in a terrarium. Yet, whether I'm a bug in a jar or a bug under a tree, it remains that I'm still a bug who, for all intents and purposes, can be squashed wherever I am.
I am feeling a huge push in the direction of elsewhere. Travel. To get out from under my rock and leave the place where I feel most at home. I've never left here, not really. Twice I've left the Pacific Coast, 12 times I've left the Northwest. In my life. From making the step from Grays Harbor to Seattle, I've kind of claimed Western Washington as my larger home, and I feel sure that my stay here is almost up. For now, anyway.
(Forgive me if I dramatize, I've just finished reading epic literature, so my words are probably echoing the grandeur.)