All I need is a blue sky, azure and bright, to ease my mind, reassure me things are all right with the world. Like a warm hug from the universe, it reminds me always to look up, to think of the bigger picture, to remember the world is so much more vast and wonderful than the tiny problems weighing me down.
Gray skies? They call for a warm cup of tea, a blanket and dreaming. Barring that, I wish for rain. Let the sky fall open and patter me with cooling water, a deep drink for Mother Earth. And I don’t even carry an umbrella. What’s a little damp in an otherwise ordinary life? And cold? Oh, please, I beg for snow. Tiny white flakes fluttering, drifting like the cast-offs from a ream of notebook paper. But wait, look closely, the patterns are extraordinary. We humans think ourselves so creative, but consider the snow cloud.
Let those minuscule sculptures accumulate like the fluffiest down blanket transforming the landscape, fresh and magical, if for only an hour. Despite my years surrounded mostly by concrete, asphalt, brick and steel, I find my greatest solace in nature. The cooling calm of green grass, the changeable rhythm of the gray-green Hudson, its depths unknowable, its levels climbing and falling with the tides, the moon.
I’ve taken, in the warm weather, to spending time in a park along the Hudson with my feet firmly planted in the grass, feeling with the soles of my feet the rhythms of this vast planet and remembering the days of my childhood when standing barefoot in the grass wasn’t something I had to plan.
We are all mammals, creatures of this planet, try though we might to tame, to control, to shape it to our imagined needs. True sustenance still lies wholly within the arms of the benevolent Mother Earth.
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Jessica Ciosek writes and lives in New York City. Her short story appeared in the “Mothers” issue of Minerva Rising.
