A Color of the Sky

From Anne Sexton's The Sun:

Now I am utterly given.

I am your daughter, your sweet-meat,

your priest, your mouth and your bird

and I will tell them all stories of you

until I am laid away forever,

a thin gray banner.

Until last summer, I spent bright days inside.  I loved the sun as a kid, but years of working during daylight hours (and fear of skin cancer, sunburn, etc.) kept me out of that bright light. Then, a year ago, I became involved with the Lawrence Arts Center and worked there during a lot of daylight hours.  I started to feel the itch to recharge, to lay in the heat--covered in spray on sunblock--soaking up sun, sweating, blood throbbing in my veins.  Sometimes at a friends' apartment complex pool, sometimes at the swimming beach at Clinton Lake, sometimes in my back yard with ice water to sprinkle myself if I got hot.  

It is that time of year again and I am feeling the itch, the need to lie in the heat, to soak up what I can, to feel exhausted from the complete stillness of sun worship.  Yesterday I played with my dog outside and when she tired I sat to read...which led to a thirty minute solar nap that felt better than other thirty minutes of sleep I've had in recent months.

I didn't get to spend too much time out today, but I did catch the sunset as it happened, and these pictures show it in order.  And these stanzas in this poem, which I stumbled across today, also fits.

Two stanzas from A Color of the Sky, Tony Hoagland

   What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.   

   What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.   

   What I thought was an injustice
                                             turned out to be a color of the sky.

   ...so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.   

   It’s been doing that all week:

   making beauty,

   and throwing it away,

  and making more.