The day of endless sky – anecdote.

The day of endless sky.

 

There are days when there is electricity in the air; the whole world hums as the dynamo that drives it is racing. The day is so alive that it drowns out the drone of a multitude of bees. The sounds blend into harmony and sate the ears.

On a day such as this I once lay in the long grass of a meadow that was a mass of summer colour, golden hay, yellow buttercup, white and orange daisy and purple clover. The fields bobbed with crimson poppy and the feather-top grass rippled in the soft breeze.

The air was thick like treacle with the honey scent of rich nectar and sticky heat and the yellow sun cut through the transparent air with incandescent starkness in a cascade of scorching rays that bleached the soil and heated the skin.

The dry grass all around rustled with the scurrying of a million creatures: shiny black beetles, stridulating grasshoppers that shot through the air to glide on orange wings, land on grass stalks, grip anew and shift into invisibility; spiders, earwigs, bugs and ladybirds. The bees bumbled purposefully from flower to flower with swollen sacks of pollen on their kind-legs and guts full of sweet nectar while a cacophony of butterflies danced a silent symphony, bobbing and dancing, balletically, prancing on the eddies, white, crimson, orange and yellow, with eyes, speckled patterns and patches on gossamer wings; gnats dodged and buzzed, forming clouds as mists of pollen drifted and hover-flies darted and hung over blossom.

It all merged into a background of contentment as time slowed to a meaningless crawl.

On days like these there is nothing else to be done other than lie on your back, chew on a stalk of grass, place your hands behind your head, let the whole world of people disappear and stare up into the heavens.

Into the depths of that endless electric blue my eyes pierced and my mind drifted into wonder.

Before that childhood gaze there were suddenly no boundaries or horizons; there were no limits.

On that blazing, lazy, baked summer day I discovered just how big the universe really was and fell up into the sky in a fit of vertigo.

I do not believe that all of me ever came back down to earth.

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