Tag Archives: Sky

On My Mind

The Sky

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The sky is changing.

My bike spent time in the shop this week, which meant I walked to work. At first I was annoyed, because of course there were things I’d planned to do on that first surprising morning and I wanted to get to work early to do them. I took a moment to be frustrated and then, because there was no other option, pulled myself out of my head and into the day.

This is when I noticed the sky changing. The gray was no longer steely and imposing, but softer, gentler. The light not hours away, but minutes. People riding without bike lights were suddenly less foolish and more visible. Morning was not long in coming, but rather already here.

Just over a year ago, when I first knew I was moving to Germany, I received photos of snow from the colleague I replaced. This was atypical, I was told, and I have since learned that snow like that, snow like the snow I grew up with, only happens every ten years or so.

When I was a child, we waited impatiently for snow days that never came, no matter how many spoons were carefully placed under pillows or pajamas worn inside out. Rochester, New York gets a lot of snow, or at least it used to, and we lived with it. The climate has certainly changed, but my parents’ photos of snow still look like I remember it. Lake effect, they say on the news, as though the type of snow makes any difference to children playing. I only remember one time when a snowball thrown contained more ice than snow and a neighbourhood boy went home crying; I’m sure that happened more than one time.

I remember climbing on the piles of shovelled snow to see the white, white world from a point higher than the lamppost in our yard. I remember the time my dad left his car at the top of the hill behind our house and hiked down, snow up to his waist. I used to keep sandbags in the trunk of my car so that I could drive through the hills leading to our neighbourhood, though sometimes I took the long way to avoid the sharpest right. There was always the danger of missing it. Cycling up that hill in the summer was no one’s idea of fun, so we never did. From the top, there was first a red barn and then fields and then sky.

Two weekends ago, a group of friends headed south into the Thüringer Wald to go for a walk in the snow. There’s usually snow there, I’m told, though it rained there this winter, too.

We greeted cross-country skiers and children sledding and kept the dog away from other dogs. We climbed the tower and were forced back down by the wind, tossed two tiny frisbees, ate delicious muffins and other snacks pulled from backpacks. The boys had a snowball fight and I played photographer as the group built two snowmen. We played in the snow because that’s what snow is for.

The sky was right there through the trees.

The house I grew up in was at the top of one hill and the bottom of a smaller hill, but a hill all the same. The cul-de-sac gave us a snow mountain that grew gradually larger each time the plows came around. As children, we named it after our street and friends from outside the neighbourhood would come over to play in the snow. Building a fort using recycling boxes was always harder than we thought it would be. My siblings and I used to dress our snowmen in Hawaiian shirts from our dress-up box; Mum always gave us a carrot for the nose.

You could see the world from the top of that hill. You could look out across neighbourhoods, across trees, and watch the leaves and the sky change. The atmosphere was peaceful well before I knew the world. Rochester is a cloudy place, a place where, on the rare sunny days, people suddenly come out of their shells. You see smiles where there were previously faces hidden in scarves or behind hoods of raincoats. People greet one another more warmly and the general mood is one of optimism and joy. I have never in my life known people so happy to see the sun.

I forgot that feeling, and then I left the equator and came to another place that is cloudy, a place where I have recently felt the sky change. In Singapore, my apartment looked out over a highway and then the towns to the north. When the sky took over the buildings in the distance, rain was coming. Sky in the tropics changes in a flash, in a second, and if you don’t look now, it’ll be different in a breath. Hours could pass watching it.

This week I saw the sky changing.

And today, clouds are moving across the sun.

On My Mind

Glow

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The weather gave us a gift this weekend. We had sun, blue skies, and temperatures perfect for being outside. (Although nothing really seems to stop Germans from being outside, which I like very much.) I was out late Sunday morning revisiting a route I’d taken with a friend some weeks ago. We had looked in vain for sunshine that day and the walk was bound to feel different this time.

One thing I have always noticed about walking with my camera is that my senses are sharper, and not just my eyes. I see the world differently, but am also more aware of how it tastes, how it smells, how it feels, and where I stand within it.

In other words, the more present I am, the calmer and more peaceful I feel. The camera around my neck acts as a reminder. Likewise, the more experienced I become in meditation, the more easily awareness seeps into my everyday life. I pause more frequently, slow down, notice, breathe. This is what it means to be mindful.

Lately there have been several loving-kindness, or metta, meditations in my routine. The warmth that I experience through these practices is not unlike the warmth I experienced last weekend in the sun. The world opens wide and it calls.

What I like most about metta meditation is that it makes obvious our connection with one another. There is a physical sensation, a warm glow, that comes from that realization.

There is a warm glow that comes from wishing loving-kindness to others, similar to the sense of rejuvenation that comes from being in nature. I have learned that these are needs for me, needs rather than wants. I would like to think that I am a better person to those around me for having learned this and sought this out.

It is easy to form connections that are light and fun, to play outside on a sunny day. It is not always so easy to get out in the rain or cold, not always so easy to touch another person. But so often, it is the experience of doing exactly this, of embracing difficult conditions and searching for the light, that plants us firmly on the ground.

And this is when we can not only look, but see.

Singapore

Summer in Singapore

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That it has been two and a half weeks since my last entry and I haven’t noticed should say a thing or two about where my mind has been lately. Everywhere, nowhere, now here.

My friends, colleagues, and I are again spending the summer in Singapore. Our visa status, just like last year, does not guarantee that we will be allowed reentry. It’s hard on everyone, of course, and the best thing to do, the only thing to do, is make the best of where we are and what there is. Lucky for us, there is a great deal of life to be lived if you’re willing to go out and look.

Back in May, on a holiday weekend that otherwise would have found many of us on a plane to somewhere else, two friends and I walked Singapore’s Green Corridor from Hillview south to Tanjong Pagar. This was 13km of the 24km-long trail and I was more interested in the conversation with my friends (and some general antics) than taking photos. Two photos that I did take, however, largely summarize my experience on this part of the trail.

The Green Corridor is an abandoned, overgrown, redeveloped rail corridor that once linked Singapore with the rest of the Malay Peninsula. There were reminders of the railroad everywhere, and reminders that nature, trees, will always be there. Trees are steady, strong, resilient. They bend so that they do not break, reroot to build a new home. They shelter, they provide, they live on. I don’t need to read the research (although I have) on the power of nature to slow down the body. I am reminded every single day.

The tree in the photo below reminded me yet again. It was our first landmark on the Green Corridor. It knew, well before we knew, the role that collective resilience would come to play in all of our lives.

There were points along the walk where the rail line, a marker of what the world was and how it was defined, disappeared. There were times when we were simply walking on an open path between field and road, protected by fences and foliage on either side. Walking south, we watched the distance between ourselves and the shipping cranes in Tanjong Pagar gradually shrink. But every so often, reminders reappeared. Reminders that Singapore, like every place, has not always been what or how it is now. Reminders of how quickly development becomes redevelopment, and the impossible dream becomes the everyday.

Although fenced off and abandoned to prevent people like me and my curious friends from exploring, it was not difficult to imagine the rail depot that this once was. Singapura is the Malay name for Singapore. That’s what this place was, and at its very core, there is so much of Singapura that remains for those who ask, who learn, who look.

Just a few days ago, one of my friends and I finished the walk. We started up north this time, further north than we needed to because the maps are not obvious, and followed the rest of the trail from Woodlands south to Hillview.

Before finding the trail, we lost ourselves on a fortunate detour that took us to the Rainbow Bridge in a part of Singapore we’d never seen before.

And by the time we found the trail, running perpendicular to a current MRT line, we discovered a Singapore that was well and truly Singapura, and before that, a forest.

There were a few times when this northern stretch converged with modern life, but the excitement of seeing different trees, different plants, different flowers, and hearing different birds and animals remained throughout the walk. These are parts of this place that I have never seen but that remind me, somehow, of places I have known. Perhaps in a different story in a different life.

I have a great respect for these places that have taken me from my everyday to a totally different world that was once the world. In discussions of change, I think we forget how rapidly change can occur. And because we forget that, we also lose sight of what exactly is changing, and to what degree, and when. And we forget that nature is stronger than we are.

A very special off-shoot of the Green Corridor is a short walk through Clementi Forest. We heard about it back in May when we saw a few women, covered in mud and exhilarated, rejoin the main train and celebrate. Clementi Forest is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a rainforest. Now. Again. It has grown over the rail line that is still visible through the mud, under fallen trees, and in the gully that was dug long ago to house it. To imagine this island, known for modernity, as the rainforest it used to be is today’s equivalent of the impossible dream of a world powered by technology.

And to take the time to seek out the impossible is to find yourself in a different place, a different world than what you thought you knew. And that’s just it, isn’t it? We only know what we know and there is so much out there to leave us in the child-like embrace of wonder.