I remember reading a children’s story when I was  young about a man who wandered the countryside, looking for messages from the sky, everyone thought he was crazy, and he thought the same thing of them. He wondered how they could go about their lives disregarding the sky, too buy. I wander the woods sometimes talking to the sky, and I spent most of my life wondering why I was crazy and everybody else was sane. Lately, I have begun wondering if the opposite is true, if I am sane and the world is crazy.

I suppose we are all sane in our own way, each of us answering to our own lights. The sky seemed to riot today, it was like a Times Square Billboard, changing colors and depths, the sky was sending me all kinds of messages all day, it was a cacophony. This morning, it was dark and worm, then a deluge, then snow and ice, then a deep freeze began, the ground hardened, the roads became slick. Everyone hear talk about the black ice, it is perhaps the most universally feared thing in the country, we have all had hard experiences with it.

And then, a glorious chorus, in the late afternoon the sky cleared and let burst one last glorious burst of light, it framed my barn and the trees so beautifully, I appreciate the backlighing from the heavens. This was an interlude, an intermission, a reminder not of how cold and intense the sky can be, but how beautiful and uplifting. Are you getting my messages, the sky seemed to ask me?

Yes, I said, I am getting them, I am hearing them. Today you showed me the rainbow, life, death, darkness and light, awe and glory and finally, the great work of art, light and color. I can warm my spirit if not my body.