The sky has been shifting all day, changing from blue to grey, filling with swollen white clouds then darkening to sudden, pounding rain.
It reminds me how much we change throughout the day, the mercurial nature of our emotions. One minute the world is an exquisite gift, the birds sing, a dog runs exuberantly toward the grass, the young girl next door smiles at you with her two front teeth. Then the sky darkens and there is a weight to everything, as if the day itself has sat on your chest.
It is easy to get caught up in these changes, to tell ourselves stories about their permanence. But they are simply the shifting sky, the moving ground, the endless movement that is life. It reminds me of a line from Rilke, “let everything happen to you, beauty and terror…no feeling is final.”
Outside the wind had picked up, sending a white flight of clouds across the sky. To the north the afternoon is darkening. But south, in a crook of perfectly blue sky, the sun is shining hello.
