Behold this sky, It is a gift sent only once

FTLComm - Tisdale - July 24, 2000

This sky is how this morning began for me after breakfast around eight, I was pleased to see the sun working its way through the multiple layers of cloud above. With a sixty percent chance of rain today these clouds seem to match the prospects, yet temperatures remain quite acceptable for people and plants.

This is how Sunday, July 23 came to a close as the sky was filled with bits and pieces of cloud fragments. It was not to be denied, it had to be photographed so that this splendor could be shared and perhaps its essence retain in some small way.

Stumbling and tripping is not a way to impress your fellow travellers in this journey of life and so it is that we spend a remarkable amount of our time starring at the ground hoping to detect the pebbles and multiple other hazards that might embarrass us, even to ourselves. My quest is to help you look up and see far more than the ground beneath your feet. For the sky is nothing but air, wind, water and the reflections of light. Unlike the tangible and substantial solidity of the ground, the sky only occasionally becomes robust enough to alter in a violent way, that which it sweeps over. But we, the mortals who have been endowed with limited reason, confused perception, and excellent vision, need so

very much to look up. Oh certainly, the clouds and colours, the simplicity of weather and graphic delights are a reason to look up, but please do not stop there. It is for us all to go beyond the "what seems to be" and with the prodigious mental

capacity with which we are all blessed, we must let our minds take us to where our eyes measure and receive images of light, with which we can turn to thoughts far beyond our existence. Do not accept those folds and wisps as though they were painted on a canvas, for they are not. They are three dimensional near objects, that extend upward, left and right close and beyond. Transform these images, move among them and allow your minds eye to reconstruct them as they would seem from above or from behind. Everyone can move and reconfigure their reality with the simulation capability of our brains, yet we so seldom push ourselves to

play with images that we see and project ourselves to where we can not go with our bodies. In the picture below with careful eyes you will discover a purple martin searching for an evening snack. Join that martin and consider what he or she is seeing ahead, around and below.

Seeing is far more then a dull look, it is exercising your mind to value and weigh the remarkable features of your perceived reality. The skills you can develop will let you know, only peer into the visual limitations of the unknown, but transfer that same process to the world of concepts, ideas, real and abstract and you will be well on your way to transcending the superficial and intellectual cognition and blinding insight is just around the corner. Below is the scene, twenty-one separate pictures takes you a full three hundred sixty degrees around the horizon. Your computer and the software that blended those images together, allows you to search around this scene with your eyes but also with your mind. (QuickTime is needed to access this perspective it is easy to install and is free)

No matter what crisis faces you, how limited your resources, or the strain and stress that affects your life, this sky, its beauty and wonder are yours, free and you have exclusive rights to make and use all that it can inspire you to now and from each day hence. For indeed, such beauty is a gift sent to you only once. Oh there will be other wonderful skies which also will offer you solace and unfettered pleasure, but they too will only appear to you but once. Miss not a single opportunity to savour that which is good and totally unique. The solutions, the promises, the bold and vast future is there for you to sample and then emulate. Take it in to your mind and soul for behold it is your sky.