In Finding Livelihood, I quoted a couple sentences from Willa Cather's Death of the Archbishop about the sky above Santa Fe: “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!”

I thought of Cather's words recently and the glory and beauty that is the sky when reading a new book by Richard Carter, The City Is My Monastery: A Contemporary Rule of Life. In his book, using both poetry and short essay, Carter writes about ways of being with God and with others in community: with silence, with service, with scripture, with sacrament, with sharing, with Sabbath, and staying with.

A section that Carter wrote about the sky keeps resonating with me and—in a strange way, given that it's about the sky—is grounding. In his chapter on silence, here’s what he writes on page 22:

“Remember the image of clouds in the sky. The clouds come; the clouds pass; we are not the cloud; we are the sky. Sometimes the cloud feels so dark that it needs to shed its load. And so the cloud pours out its rain. This is like the grief within us that must be shed. The tears and sorrow dispersing the weight of the cloud. Remember we are not the cloud nor the rain. We hold this within; we let it go; the cloud dissolves; we are the sky.”

I love that. We are not the cloud; we are the sky.

~~~

[Photo: a late-afternoon late-winter sky]