Learning to Look Up

A creative project falls out of the sky

South Beach/Katama sunset (photo by Jan Brogan)

One of my favorite winter things to do on Martha’s Vineyard is take an evening walk that starts at the Katama Airfield and reaches South Beach, just as the sun sets over its western edge. As my husband and I walk back to the car, under that vast expanse of runway sky, we often get a glimpse of a rising moon or the first stars on the horizon.

But there was a time, not that long ago, when the sky didn’t mean all that much to me. That changed because of a creative project I undertook after an email from a random stranger:

Look at the sky as often as you “can”—for about 21 days.

I’ll contact you again in 3 weeks.

More Light,

Jack Borden

It arrived right I’d published a piece about meditation in The Boston Globe. Although journalists learn to be wary of emails that come out of the blue, something about the concise writing style told me that this guy knew media.

He was a former Boston television reporter, I learned, who had given up media work in the mid-1980s to launch a foundation, For Spacious Skies. At the time, this former non-profit worked to get people to look up at the sky more. It organized high-profile environmental awareness events, developed sky appreciation curricula for elementary schools, and programs for prisons and nursing homes.

Since I was the kind of person inclined to live inside my own head and not see what is right in front of me, I took on Jack’s challenge. I pitched a first-person essay to the Globe’s Arts Section that involved me keeping a “sky journal” for 21 days and writing about it.

First off: It came as a sobering surprise to learn the sky changed continually throughout the day: that’s how rarely I’d ever looked at it before. I entertained myself by learning to identify every cloud by name, checking against the images and definitions on For Spacious Skies website.

(That site no longer exists, but here are close facsimiles: UCAR Center for Science Education and SciJinks. )

Soon I recognized “M-1 days,” when the sky looks like one single undefined gray cloud (aka, mid-level altostratus). I interrogated my husband, an avid sailor and small-plane pilot, about cloud types and how they can predict weather changes. I stopped listening to audiobooks when out for walks and focused on the sky and the world around me.

Photo by Clyde RS on Unsplash

Two weeks into the 21-day experiment, things began to shift. I stopped asking questions and consulting the cloud chart. It was no longer about the science of the sky, or even the beauty. It was about the enormity.

When I asked Jack Borden about it, he said—somewhat tentatively, as if it might be off-putting—that ultimately the sky became “a spiritual matter,” for him. A neuroscientist I interviewed likened it to a form of meditation.

It was both those things for me, but more importantly, I learned to really see the medium I lived my life in. Daily.

And because the sky is so big and—let’s face it, hard-to-miss—it wasn’t just a temporary shift. It’s never left me.

As a creative project, my essay, published in 2013, remains a personal favorite. And it brought me real joy when I learned online that both a Protestant sermon and in a rabbi’s blog referenced it.

Jack Borden and I corresponded for about seven years. He mailed me all sorts of sky-watching paraphernalia. He encouraged me to look for “sun dogs,” a phenomena that appear as two small matching halos of refracted light on either side of the sun. And that I was lucky to see once in my life dogs over State Beach just before dusk.

During COVID, I wrote about Jack when the National Day Calendar proclaimed April 14, 2020 the inaugural “Look Up at the Sky Day,” in honor of his 92^nd birthday. He passed away later that year. Though I never met him in person, I mourned his passing, as did countless others.

I can’t help thinking that he lives on, every time I look up at the sky.