You Will Never See the Sky the Same Way Again

Look up.

 

The air appears endless, doesn't it? A soft blue canopy by day, a glittering infinity by night. But you can find moments — unusual, quiet minutes — when it thinks alive. When the stars sharpen against the blackness, when the breeze breaks, and you sense that the entire sky is keeping their breath.

 

And in these minutes, you recognize the truth: the air is watching.

 

Nonetheless it won't ever speak.

 

We imagine the sky as a gap, clear and silent. Yet it's anything but empty. Over people extends a sleepless ocean of air and gentle, swirling with unseen invisible currents. Winds scream round the world at speeds that would tear us apart. Rivers of heat and cool increase and drop in habits older than any living thing. Clouds bloom and fall like ideas overweight to hold.

 

And through it all, the atmosphere maintains their silence.

 

But silence is different as absence.

 

The air remembers.

 

Every fireplace that burned a forest to the floor, every eruption that darkened your day with ash, every surprise that flooded cities and carved rivers in to rock — the atmosphere bears all it. Ash from volcanoes that erupted before people existed however drifts in its top layers. Dust from deserts halfway all over the world travels on the breeze to seed clouds over distant oceans. Also the air you are breathing now after passed through the lungs of mammoths, dinosaurs, and animals older still.

 

It keeps each of it. Patiently. Quietly.

 

We study the sky. We release satellites to pierce its techniques, evaluate winds, track storms, and estimate rain. We think we understand it.

 

But we are wrong.

 

We only actually view the surface.

 

There are days once the stop thinks large — the sort of stop that pushes on your chest, the stillness before lightning tears open the dark. Actually the birds fall mute. Also the bugs pause. That quiet feels planned, ancient, as though the entire atmosphere is waiting.

 

And then it releases every thing it absolutely was holding.

 

Mastery sheets over the land. Winds shout through valleys and across oceans. Rain hammers the ground so violently so it erases noise itself. We contact it chaos. Nevertheless the sky?

 

The atmosphere is just allowing go.

 

The sky has observed things we cannot imagine.

 

It seen meteors strike openings to the world, viewed oceans freeze in to glass and deserts bloom wherever none should exist. It's carried the smoke of burning sides and the whispers of civilizations extended gone. It has heard every word we have actually spoken upward, every track, every prayer, every eager cry — and solved with silence.

 

Possibly that's why we look to it so frequently for meaning.

 

We study omens in the positions of stars, in the shapes of clouds, in the arc of the moon. We find ease in sunrises and closure in sunsets. Nevertheless the sky doesn't arrange it self for us.

 

It just is.

 

And today, the atmosphere is changing.

 

We have stuffed it with issues that don't belong. Smoke. Carbon. Chemicals. Light. We've made their orange haze paler, dirtier. We've punched openings in its shield, allowing the sun's radiation through. We have stuck its temperature, making their storms angrier, their droughts lengthier, their winters and summers tougher to predict.

 

And however, the atmosphere does not speak.

 

But it's answering.

 

Its storms reduce deeper now. Winds reach farther and grab harder. Shoots burn off higher as the air it self is becoming hungrier. Droughts stay until the soil cracks. Floods rise higher than they ever did before.

 

We don't need words to know what is happening.

The atmosphere is showing us.

 

There may come each day when the atmosphere forgets people completely.

 

Once the lights of our towns fade, once the smoking of our products drifts out, when the wind sweeps across mountains that have swallowed our ruins. Clouds may collect over places where number highways remain. Water may fall on ground that has removed our names.

 

And the air it's still here, holding our dirt and air and parts in exactly the same way it carries every thing else.

 

We will turn into a storage flattened into their silence.

 

But there's splendor in that.

 

As the atmosphere isn't our enemy. It is the breath of the Planet, the mild that warms people, the guard that holds life in. It cradles every chicken in flight, every drifting seed, every start and dusk. It's first thing we see when we open our eyes and the last thing we see once we shut them forever.

 

Perhaps their silence isn't indifference.

Maybe it's listening.

 

The next time you step external during the night, stop. Look up.

 

Begin to see the stars using light-years away, their gentle avove the age of history. Begin to see the clouds glowing faintly in the moonlight, exactly the same clouds which have drifted around countless lives before yours. Have the thin veil of air separating you from the cold machine of space.

 

And realize: you're part of this history too.

 

The atmosphere will never tell you its secrets.

It won't describe the storms, the droughts, the heat, the cold.

 

But if you are still enough, if you are calm enough, you may experience it.

 

The large, patient existence above you.

The hush prior to the lightning.

The endless storage of air and light.

 

The atmosphere does not require words.

 

Because it never stopped watching.