Why the Sky?

About me: 
     When I look back over almost 70 years, I realize I had twelve spiritual teachers when I was young.  My first was the sky, the day sky of clouds and the night sky of stars.  The second was the George Washington Bridge, which stretched like a low-flying angel over the Hudson.  The third was my mother. The fourth was my parish church, where God lived in a beautiful gold box on the altar.  The fifth was the sign outside our neighborhood synagogue.  The letters looked like musical notes from the songs that the angels were singing way over our heads.  The sixth was my mother's garden -- the azaleas she grew on the fire escape, weather permitting.
     The seventh was the children's room in our local branch of the New York Public Library.  There I first met Sara Crewe, Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Princess, who was a spiritual master in her own right.  The eighth was Anne of Green Gables and the transcendently beautiful setting in which she lived.  The ninth was Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and all the stories in that series, which taught -- without preaching -- the values of practical helpfulness and emotional honesty.  The tenth was the Cloisters, the museum that brought the Middle Ages alive in painting, sculpture and music, and that I lived close enough to walk to.  The eleventh was rain -- spring showers, summer thunderstorms, and the cold blowing rains of autumn and winter.  The twelfth was my friend Susan.           
    And now, after living for almost 40 years in and around Orlando, I'm a retired English teacher, a retired mental health counselor and an active writer.  With the encouragement of my husband, Jerry, another spiritual master, and the warm support of my tabby Lizzie, I've been collecting my stories and poems for children as well as cat-themed (!) short stories for adults and putting them on Kindle.  It's been a rich life. . . .


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Here's my first post:  

    When my friend's son was two years old, he wouldn't go to bed before looking at the moon.  He would insist, "Moon, I want moon," and his mother would have to take him out into the driveway.  If he couldn't find the moon, she would tell him it was behind the trees and would come out after he was asleep.  That satisfied him.  He'd had his taste of moon.
     The first time I watched this, I thought back over fifty years to the time I was ten or twelve, when I would stand at the window of my bedroom and stare at the stars.  I worried obsessively about getting my homework done, but as soon as I pressed my face to the glass and looked above the roofs of the neighboring buildings, I could see the stars and they obliterated everything else. 
     That greatness could be so tiny, that time could fall away, leaving only eternity, that I somehow belonged to the sky, although there was no visible connection between us -- all these were a miracle, an abiding astonishment.
     (I learned that expression "abiding astonishment" from the Jewish philosopher, Emil Fackenheim, when I went to a lecture he gave, shortly after I graduated from college.  He used it to describe an event like the crossing of the Red Sea, which leaves the participants and their descendants with a sense of awe that never goes away.)
     When I think back further, I realize that my first flashes of memory also involved the sky.  I had a split-second of consciousness while I was  standing in my crib.  I can still see the curtains of the window next to my crib as well as the sky beyond.  I also remember going around the corner of the street outside our apartment building when I was three years old to get something from a "candy store," as people in NYC called a news agent who also sold candy, gum and soda.  I was coming back when a storm began to blow up.  I stared at the clouds and felt frightened, not for myself but for my mother who was safely inside our living room.
     Years later, I asked my mother if I could really have been allowed out by myself when I was three.  "Oh yes," she said, being full of confidence in me and amazingly, almost unbelievably, naïve about danger.
     Our original apartment was right on the approach to the George Washington Bridge in upper Manhattan, so there was a wide spread of sky over the Hudson River, where sunsets could be dazzling.  I went back to that neighborhood even after we moved ten blocks away, because I felt "called" to this big sky country (and I offer my apologies to the people of Montana, which no doubt has a better right to the title).
     But beyond the beauty of the physical sky, there seems to be another dimension, at least for me.  I remember when I worked as a counselor that I was always listening not only to what people said but what they meant by what they said.  I wanted to learn the meaning of what they were telling me.  Or in other words, why they were telling it.  Usually I could do that, but one time I was so exhausted -- burned out, really -- that I couldn't get my understanding up high enough to see the point of it all.  The key word here is "up."       
     Since "sky" is almost synonymous with "up," I think of the sky as the place where the meanings live.  Where coherence lives.  Where whatever pulls our stories, our poems, our lives into meaningful shape has its seat of power.  But more about that later!