We lack an appreciation of the sky

Never thought that a sliver of sky could evoke such a feeling of oneness with the universe. After walking through the Sydney CBD, through the hustle and bustle, the traffic and throng of people - businessmen on their profitable walkabout, women who looked like models cascading through, tourists sitting at Town Hall, taking pictures, looking in shops at the Queen Victoria Building, teens lurking in a video arcade or near Hoyts movie centre - I took a bus on the way home.
So the sights were of neat buildings, stores, roads and people - a cosmopolitan surrounding, right? Suddenly I noticed the sun-roof of the bus, and there was just such a difference: the blue sky. Like a window against the shadowed world.

An appreciation of the sky is an appreciation of openness, of vastness, of beauty.

Yet our whole civilization is hinged on alienating people from their environment. Houses do not have sun roofs, cars - except maybe convertibles, which only shows our treatment of nature as a luxury - are hooded, and there's no option of the hood sliding temporarily to give way to a transparent roof to enable heavenly awe. We are entreated to see only the mundane, we are children of the buildings that imprison our sweeping view. We are not reminded of the amazing background that is nature.

And we forget that it's such a small part of it all, that had we time to take a few minutes to look, all the troubles, all the pain, all the enmity, seem so trivial and comic, compared to the awesome wholeness of it all. So next time, take a few minutes to see, really see, the above-encompassing sky.