The other day, while driving home after our volunteer work at the farm animal sanctuary, James and I stopped off at swimming hole that I found out about a couple of months ago. I’ve been taking a short but highly enjoyable dip there each week, as a way to cool down and clean up after shoveling various kinds of animal poop for several hours. For the first four or five times I stopped at the swimming hole I couldn’t get James to even leave the car, much less go in the water. But as the weather got warmer, and my persistence continued, he finally went in with me last week for the first time.
The next week James’ resistance to going in had decreased, and afterwards he even concluded that he enjoyed both the little swim in the cool water and laying out on the hot rock bank afterwards. While we bobbed around together, I floated on my back looking up at the very clear blue sky and told James about something I had done and thought about when I was a teenager.
As a senior in high school, I would get out of PE a little early and lay down on the grass outside of my chemistry classroom for about ten or fifteen minutes before that class started. I would look up at the expansive blue sky (I grew up in Santa Maria, CA, one of the most temperate spots in the country, so it was mostly blue skies), relax, and think to myself that throughout the rest of my life I could lay down wherever I was, however old I got, and while experiencing any kind of life situation, and return to that same pleasant place (a blue sky place), that I was in as a teenager.
Later on, I had a similar arrangement with the night sky and the Big Dipper, but that was during a time when I was working on organic farms a lot and spent more time outside at night.
I have continued the tradition of laying down in various places and looking up at the sky as a way to reflect and relax, and when the sky is blue, like it was outside of my chemistry classroom, or the other day at the swimming spot with James, I find myself drifting into the very comforting thought that regardless of the stress I might be experiencing in my own little life, or the turmoil going on in the larger world, that the sky, and the broader solar system, galaxy, universe, etc., stay largely immune to any earthly issues, and much less to any one particular human’s concerns. Unlike the cultural of people (cars, buildings, fashion, art, media, highways, all the things humans have created), the sky, and all of nature, never goes out of style, never annoys me aesthetically, and always seems perfect and timeless.
Contemplating that idea allows me to slip into a feeling of almost being a part of the sky (and nature as a whole), of losing my individual sense of self, so that my problems and upsets drift away and I can connect back to all of those particular moments (in various places and conditions) from my past of laying down and looking up, going all the way back to that first thoughtful revelation (a gift to my future person) that I experienced during the time of my teenagerness.