Compare and contrast. August 2020. The nearby Woodward fire still smolders, but its smoke is wafting in the other direction.
September 2018. Overhead one recent morning a big gap appeared in the white haze shrouding my home region since the Camp Fire erupted. For more than a week the winds that fanned the Butte County blaze into calamitous proportions also sent a monstrous tide of smoke toward the coast and San Francisco Bay. A literal white-out consumed the three-dimensional landscape we inhabit. Just to see the way to the local branch library became challenging, with an N95 mask affixed to one’s face, especially for people, like me, who wear glasses: the mask makes them steam up, so the choice is between seeing and breathing.
There has been no outdoor exercise to speak of. Body and soul are growing stiff.
That’s why this patch of blue overhead is such a delirious delight. I run to the window to make sure I’m seeing it, just the way I run to the window when a bright Townsend’s warbler hip-hops through the nearby oak foliage. How strong my response that It began much smaller, so small and surprising that I doubted its existence, at first. Yet there it is. Growing larger. The color filling this gap: sky blue. What a profound effect on the cells of my body this has, beholding this sky blue beyond all the vapor and haze, waiting to return as the weather pattern shifts. Suddenly the whole world feels like a promise, a dance. May that gap grow larger and prevail. May the clearing shine on the victims of the Butte County fire, like an affirmation.
Of course the smoke and chemical particulates shot into the lower atmosphere by the conflagration will keep going somewhere. More of our stuff, stored one way and another in our planet’s thin sheath of life-supporting gases. But right now so many people in California need to take another breath, take another step, breathe and step in mutual support, that a bit of blue sky means hope.
Perhaps it has always been this way with human beings: Looking up at clouds and sunlight and the arc of the daytime sky has bred into us a deep love of the color sky blue. Or, the colors, plural, sky blue, since the light at different locations on our planet plays with the atmosphere in varied ways, producing a whole panorama of blues.
That would make sense: for cosmology and biology to intersect when it comes to people throwing their senses open to the sky above. Consider what blue means up there, how it’s “made.” Nobody is mixing pigment and aerospraying luminous blue all around the world. Instead we are seeing a very large prism in action. The narrow sheath of gases surrounding Earth – our atmosphere – play a mechanical trick with the spectrum of light generated by our sun. Because of the wavelength of different colors in the spectrum, most are peeled off and neutralized by the atmosphere. Blue remains. It’s so strong that it stains the ocean blue (there is no liquid compound with a deep blue color dissolved throughout the sea!).
As an ethereal offspring sun and atmosphere, blue in our sky is the utmost expression of life on Earth and all its possibilities. It’s the banner color for Gaia, the self-regulating system co-created by life with solar energy and a mix of gases that modulates temperature and chemistry… for life. Our sun, which looks blindingly yellow-white overhead, and fuels the photosynthesis that ultimately gives rise to our bodies, is essential in the production of blue. Consider the color of “our” sky at night: it’s jet black and lit up by suns and galaxies that represent the closest layer of a creation untold billion miles across. Earth’s atmosphere is still there at night, just not perceptible in the same way it is by day. Sunrise on a clear, smoke-free day, catches the highest clouds overhead first, and proceeds to send reddish colors across a low angle of the prism of the atmosphere. Then we have until sunset to flourish beneath blue, to look up at water vapor and sunlight in a gaseous skin caressing the planet’s entire surface.
Today a case of the blues is a case of great joy. Let’s dance our praise, get warm in our metabolism, link rhythmically with other people and all life forms, get a bit winded, exhale CO2 into the atmosphere, give thanks for every breath.