Some of you may have noticed my unusual blog name. Some of you may have also thought, "What the heck does 'To Write The Sky' even mean?" Queue this blog post.
Now, I might just be talking to myself. Or maybe coming up with an excuse to write something. (Meanwhile, the next chapter of "The Resonance Debacle" is nagging at me, but I keep putting it off...) In any case, yesterday I saw what was possibly the most gorgeous sunset I have ever seen in my life. The urge grows strong.
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We're driving down a long country road, at the soaring speed of 60 MPH (or thereabouts). These country roads are hard to stay on, at least when you're the one driving. Luckily, I'm not, but I have done it several times, gripping the steering wheel, trying hard to stay on a road that is not nearly wide enough for such high speeds. It got easier with practice.
Me and my mother are having a conversation about a variety of things, with her driving the car and me glancing out the window, taking in eyefuls of the tree-lined countryside. This whole area is an endless collection of rolling hills topped with brown, already-harvested fields, and masses of trees fill the spaces in between. The leaves are changing color, and the trees are a beautiful blend of green and every single shade of yellow imaginable -- when the sun shines through the leaves, even the bright, fluorescent hues are revealed. In the sky hangs a dirty-grey iceberg, hazy, pieces of the ethereal ice drifting away from the large mass in the center.
As I look out across an opening through the distant collection of trees, I see a bright light burning straight through the sky, casting long shadows all across the hills. The road takes a long curve left, then right again, and we travel a bridge over the highway rushing past below. Further down the road, and the short stretch of concrete gives way to dirt and gravel.
A vast gathering of fields lies to our right, completely tree-less except for a small line at the far end; the trees are no more than an inch tall, yet they stretch out, in imitation of the African Savannah's leafy residents. I look further up once again...and my breath is gone. The space where the sun was has been replaced by a patch of gorgeous pink. Clouds of every variety drift in the sky above, some dark, some still lit by those few rays of the sun that are reaching across the very edge of the earth. My heart sings, and I wish aloud that I were an artist with a panoramic canvas, so that I might capture this scene in all its glory, and somehow do it justice.
Welcome, Autumn. Your cold winds may not be pleasant, but I am absolutely in love with your colors this year. Please, stay as long as you like. Winter can wait for now.
So how do you write the sky, you ask? It is the art of taking these beautiful pictures, and somehow stuffing the picture inside of a mass of words, to let the imagination do the work of the eyes, bring the scene to life in the way no other medium can. Words are more than a sequence of symbols designed to communicate facts. They are the paint with which the writer creates an image, and the empty page is the canvas. There are no limits, and you need do no more than find just the right hue. Is it a jump, a leap, a bound, a dive, or a hop? Do the birds simply fly, or do they soar, glide, or even flit (if we are talking about sparrows or finches)?
A word for every shade imaginable, a "color" to capture any picture in the mind.
This is how you write the sky.
