The Sky

After having lived in Nova Scotia for eight years now, I take most things in stride.

However, there’s one area in which I seem to have kept my beginner’s mind: appreciating the sky. The sky here never lets me down–at least not on the days you can actually see it. Several times a week I am literally stopped in my tracks just looking at how ridiculously beautiful it is.

It’s not a “living outside the city” thing, as I’ve done that before. I suspect it might be a “living near the ocean” thing, but I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is that the clouds here don’t look like the clouds anywhere else–sometimes they look so perfect that my brain can’t parse them as real, and tries to convince me that the whole thing is a manufactured backdrop. Oh cognitive irony, that faced with raw beauty the only way my poor brain can interpret it is “it can’t be real, it’s too perfect”.

And the sunsets.

My God, the sunsets.

I was driving home the other night at sunset–I drive into the west to get home from the city–and realized that the entire sky was one ridiculous continuous rainbow, with the indigos and violets above me, fading into blues and then greens before me, and down into oranges, yellows, and reds by the horizon. There’s no way to adequately describe it; you just had to be there. I had to pull over to the side of the highway and just look at the sky for a while. Everyone else seemed to just take it for granted. (Maybe I am a little insane about this–certainly many people I know are tired of me going on about it–but if so, it’s a very pleasant kind of insane.)

And that was not a rare occurrence. This time of year it’s pretty common for me to be driving home into the sunset, and more often than not it just floors me. And it’s never the same show twice. In the parts of the year when sunset comes earlier, and I’m usually home for the show, it’s not unknown for me to sit at the dining room table, and just look out the large, west-facing, bay windows while the sun goes down behind the trees.

Tonight I stopped an took a couple of pictures, a few minutes apart, to try to illustrate the show. Do click through for the larger versions, to see something closer to what I saw–although these pictures really don’t do the real thing justice at all.

Here’s what I saw when I stopped in a little cul de sac beside the highway:

Walking over to look down the highway–towards my home–I could see this:

It’s like a symphony in purple and gold, isn’t it?

Then wait just a few minutes… until the moment when the sky absolutely catches fire, and then take more-or-less the same shots:

When the time comes for me to leave Nova Scotia, I’m going to miss a lot of things, and especially a lot of people… but I suspect the thing I’ll miss the most often is that feeling of being regularly knocked on my ass by the sheer beauty of the sky.