Fourth Form of Madness

When I was about 8 one of my fellow school mates casually whispered to me at the end of story time on the mat, “It’s hard to believe that the sky goes on forever”. Now at 8 this was something I had never even considered and this statement quite literally blew my mind, or at the very least extended its boundaries. As I sat there contemplating this difficult concept, I felt how unsettled and undefined my mind had become as it had no experience to comprehend it with. I loved the feeling though, so it shouldn’t have been any surprise that I fell in love with philosophy years later.

From then on I have always had a thing with the sky. My father is a sea person, he is definitely at his happiest when he is in his boat or somehow near the water. My mother is an earthy person, her special place is her garden and she has often told me that she feels that this is her sanctuary. For me my sanctuary is the sky. If I want to kick back and relax and recharge, I can achieve it by lying on a blanket in our back garden looking up at the sky. Such feelings of ease and peace can come from this simple act.

It doesn’t even have to be the “real” sky to hold my fascination. A few years back I was at a work function at a winery in the Swan Valley. There was this amazing picture of a close up of a piece of sky that had been painted by a local artist. The mood of the picture was somewhat dark with a touch of lightness coming through at the edges and I couldn’t stop staring at it. It was achingly beautiful to me. I must have stared at it with such devotion as two of the guys I worked with decided they would go halves and buy it for me. This overwhelmed me as it was quite a lot of money but one of the guys said to me “We want to do this because the way you look at that picture it really belongs with you”. I hope this was the real reason and not the wine talking 🙂

However, my favourite association with the sky came about from a random meeting with a man on a train. One evening after working late, I flopped into a seat beside a middle aged man. We struck up a conversation about a movie he had just seen. He had a rich Spanish accent and I enjoyed what he was saying as much as how he was saying it. Before long we were having an interesting conversation basically about whether people are born good or if they learn to be it. He was of the innate persuasion and I was of the “you learn’ it conviction. On and on we discussed this topic, him using examples of what he had seen in his son as he grew up, me using examples of what I had learnt during my life. We talked so much he almost missed his stop, his parting words to me was to point out that all the things I thought I had learnt about being “good” might have been me returning to innate ideas that were already within me. Nice parting shot when I didn’t have time to reply. And then he said “Thanks for the conversation, my name is …………, which means in Spanish where the sky meets the sea.” Where the sky meets the sea, I mused over this as the train continued on and then I realised, the sky doesn’t actually meet the sea, it just appears to at the horizon. For some reason I felt that familiar unsettling of my mind that I felt when I was 8 and contemplating an infinite sky and this time I settled into its unknownness with ease.