Where the Sky Forgets to Speak

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The air appears endless, does not it? A soft blue canopy by day, a glittering infinity by night. But there are instances — uncommon, quiet instances — when it thinks alive. When the stars sharpen contrary to the blackness, when the wind breaks, and you feeling that the entire sky is holding its breath.

And in these minutes, you recognize the truth: the air is watching.

Nonetheless it won't speak.

We envision the air as an emptiness, clear and silent. However it is such a thing but empty. Over people stretches a restless water of air and gentle, swirling with unseen Planet currents. Winds shout round the world at speeds that would tear people apart. Rivers of heat and cold rise and drop in patterns more than any residing thing. Clouds bloom and collapse like thoughts too heavy to hold.

And through it all, the sky keeps its silence.

But stop is different as absence.

The atmosphere remembers.

Every fireplace that burnt a forest to the ground, every eruption that stained your day with ash, every storm that flooded towns and carved streams into stone — the air carries most of it. Ash from volcanoes that erupted before people existed however drifts in their upper layers. Dirt from deserts halfway all over the world trips on the breeze to seed clouds over distant oceans. Also the air you're breathing today once transferred through the lungs of mammoths, dinosaurs, and creatures older still.

It keeps most of it. Patiently. Quietly.

We examine the sky. We release satellites to pierce its strategies, evaluate winds, track storms, and estimate rain. We believe we realize it.

But we are wrong.

We only ever look the surface.

You will find days when the silence thinks heavy — the sort of silence that squeezes on your chest, the stillness before lightning holes open the dark. Actually the birds fall mute. Actually the insects pause. That calm thinks strategic, ancient, as though the whole sky is waiting.

And then it produces every thing it was holding.

Mastery rolls across the land. Winds shout through valleys and across oceans. Water hammers the bottom therefore violently so it erases noise itself. We call it chaos. But the air?

The air is just letting go.

The atmosphere has observed things we cannot imagine.

It viewed meteors punch holes to the planet, observed oceans freeze in to glass and deserts blossom where nothing must exist. It's moved the smoke of burning worlds and the whispers of civilizations extended gone. It has heard every term we have ever spoken upward, every track, every prayer, every desperate cry — and solved with silence.

Perhaps that's why we look to it so often for meaning.

We study omens in the roles of stars, in the patterns of clouds, in the arc of the moon. We seek comfort in sunrises and closing in sunsets. Nevertheless the air does not arrange it self for us.

It really is.

And today, the atmosphere is changing.

We have stuffed it with issues that don't belong. Smoke. Carbon. Chemicals. Light. We've made their orange haze paler, dirtier. We've hit holes in its shield, letting the sun's radiation through. We have trapped its heat, making its storms angrier, its droughts longer, its winters and summers harder to predict.

And still, the atmosphere does not speak.

But it's answering.

Their storms cut deeper now. Winds achieve farther and rip harder. Shoots burn up larger as the air itself is becoming hungrier. Droughts remain until the land cracks. Floods rise higher than they ever did before.

We do not need phrases to know what is happening.

The sky is featuring us.

There may come per day when the atmosphere forgets us completely.

Once the lights of our towns diminish, when the smoking of our models drifts out, once the breeze sweeps across mountains which have swallowed our ruins. Clouds can get over places wherever no streets remain. Water will fall on soil that has erased our names.

And the air it's still here, holding our dust and breath and pieces in the same way it holds everything else.

We will develop into a storage flattened into their silence.

But there is beauty in that.

Since the air is not our enemy. It is the air of the planet, the light that warms us, the shield that holds life in. It cradles every bird in trip, every moving seed, every dawn and dusk. It's the first thing we see when we start our eyes and the past thing we see when we shut them forever.

Probably their stop isn't indifference.

Maybe it's listening.

Next time you stage outside through the night, stop. Look up.

See the stars burning light-years away, their mild over the age of history. Start to see the clouds shining faintly in the moonlight, the same clouds which have drifted over numerous lives before yours. Have the slim veil of air breaking up you from the cool vacuum of space.

And realize: you're part of the story too.

The air won't ever tell you its secrets.

It will not explain the storms, the droughts, the heat, the cold.

But if you should be however enough, if you should be calm enough, you might experience it.

The great, individual presence above you.

The hush before the lightning.

The endless memory of air and light.

The atmosphere does not require words.

Because it never ended watching.