Today I was working in my garage, which has a north-facing door. The sky to the north was darker each time I looked up from my business of organizing garage shelves. A sudden gust of wind entered the garage and blew an empty box off a shelf. As the box tumbled across the garage, I noticed the sky again – darker still. I stepped out on the driveway and directly overhead, there was blue sky heavily streaked with white clouds. As I watched, I saw that the white clouds were streaming across the sky, as though they were trying to get out of the way. The black clouds were heavy, low and threatening.
The contrast between the white clouds and the black clouds lead me to wonder how long it has been since I watched the sky. As a kid, I loved to watch the sky, day or night. I knew the constellations to look for at night and I could name the types of clouds. I loved to watch a storm roll in. I suddenly remembered a time when I arrived in the kitchen for dinner drenched because I was standing outside in the rain. As a long-distance runner, I enjoyed running in the rain during long, slow training runs. I would tell my running partner we could skip the shower when we finished.
The clouds, the smell of inevitable rain, the crisp edge to the breeze – all these signals stirred my mind, and what popped out lead me down a constellation of memories. I realized it had been a while since I stopped in the middle of a task to watch the sky. I watched it with a beginner’s mind. I watched without explaining, classifying or labeling. For a while, I sat and allowed my awareness to be as broad as the sky. And then the raindrops began to fall.