Skywards

Only from the heart can you touch the sky.

Rumi

When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

Buddha

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.

Diane Ackerman

We've enjoyed an unseasonably warm and sunny spell and I was lucky enough to travel north for a few days recently to visit with friends and see some local sights. It was a great weekend with perfect Spring weather. And because it was such a beautiful colour, I kept feeling the compulsion to point my camera at the sky - everything looks so lovely against a bright blue canvas.

You know how we all have things that are personally symbolic - motifs that are meaningful, images or items we're drawn to, totems even? Some of mine are horses, seahorses, butterflies, spirals, the ocean, compasses, swings... and skies. I love skies. I often look to the sky because it connects me, from my feet here, to the feet of my loved ones, wherever they are in the world. I love skies. Especially huge, moody, low-horizon, continent-connecting skies. I cannot resist a good sky. 

One of the things I miss most living in the UK is the African sky. Not just the colour of it, which is different, and the smell of it, which is different, but the scale of it. It's indescribable really. In the cities here, like cities everywhere of course, it becomes just a sliver, a brief glimpse, when one looks straight up or out along a road or a river. But even in the countryside or at the coast here the geography carves it up into beautiful but smaller chunks. Draws the horizon in. At its most expansive, it feels not just narrower, shorter, but shallower too.  Maybe it's something to do with curve of the earth at this distance from the equator, maybe it's just my perception of it but I look forward to standing in a humungous African sky for a while again soon. A sky that is vast - feels endlessly high and wide and deep. My head needs the space. My lungs need the space. My wings need the space.

In the meantime, I am soaking up what's available. Looking skywards often. And when it's blue, it feels bigger. So much bigger.

P.S. if you're interested to find out more about where these pictures were taken, click on each of them for a link...