Prairie Sky

What's wrong with this picture? Yes, it's beautiful, but it's on the prairie. In the Midwest. Do you see it? My final hint: check the pictures here and compare.

Today's sky is just like this - clear and vibrant blue. It's pretty unusual, here in the land of the cumulous, to have a cloudless sky. It reminds me of how strange it was to walk out in the estuary on the Petaluma River when we returned home for a visit last spring. There was a thin, striated blanket of stratus high up in the sky, and for a moment I felt disoriented, as if I were standing on the surface of the moon in tenuous gravity and I might plummet into that vast, empty sky.

The landscape creeps into our psyche. It is reflected in our moods and in our security when we recognize the safety of its boundaries at the subdermal layers of our consciousness. Hills may hem us in or they may anchor us. Empty skies and vast oceans may be free or they may hide things, or they may be sterile, void of necessary things.

Our experience pairs the landscape with our thoughts.

Photo: Carnegie Mellon University, C Higgins. CP @ GMC.