Last week I had a friend for dinner, and she convinced me to do one of her favorite activities afterward: lie on the grass in the park and look at the sky.

I was hesitant because I don’t like to lie down until nighttime, when the only goal is to end the day by losing consciousness. (My friend loves lying down for almost any reason.)

I also felt like I already know how that activity goes. Clouds drift prettily across the sky, sometimes looking like a face or a car, then turning into something else. Kind of neat but not worth making a special trip.

She insisted though, so we went, and it was the highlight of my week. I’ve been back twice since. Now I’m an evangelist for vertical sky-looking. It should be at least as popular as going to art galleries, scuba diving, or other kinds of recreational looking.

Lying on the grass and looking straight up at the sky is an entirely different activity than looking at it horizontally, along its bottom. Horizon-looking is often pleasant, especially at sunset, but it’s not the same thing at all.

Parking your body horizontally, preferably on soft grass, lets you square up to the sky and study it patiently. In this posture, you’re looking it in the face, maybe for the first time in years. Only when you look the sky in the face can you comprehend its true proportions. It is positively huge, occupying 100% of your field of vision. It’s the biggest thing you will ever see.

When you look at it directly, the sky is surprisingly active. Clouds bunched on the horizon barely seem to move. But when you square up to their plane of travel, you see how much twirling, drifting, and billowing is going on all the time.  

Without the ground as a reference, you can sense how deep the sky is. Some clouds are immense, physically bigger than mountains. A serious thunderhead can be ten miles tall, triple the base-to-summit height of Everest. But even the biggest clouds are dwarfed by the ocean of blue space behind them. Somehow the human brain is equipped to perceive this depth if you look right into it.

From your horizontal position, the earth isn’t visible, but you can sense it. As my friend pointed out, you can feel its immensity behind you while you look outward, as if you’re wearing it as a gargantuan backpack.

With the earth out of the picture, you can just as easily imagine you’re looking down at this ocean of space, suspended against a grass ceiling by a life-saving magnetic force. This is basically true. Every direction in space is as “down” as it is anything else. When your mind lets you see the sky as beneath you, you feel the great height in your loins, like you’re looking down through swirling clouds from the top of the Matterhorn. You’re hanging up here, from your invisible backpack-straps, looking down into the deepest abyss of all.

Luckily the abyss is extremely beautiful, whether it’s above or beneath. You don’t realize how many different species of cloud make up the average sky, until you look at the whole canvas at once. Your high school science textbook was wrong, with its reductive categories of cirrus, stratus, and cumulus. In person there are infinite forms: smears, tufts, wisps, sheets, bubbles, bruises, globs, mists, pinwheels, towers, chasms, fields, veins, striations, tendrils, slow explosions, and something new every few seconds.

Watching these forms move feels like you’re witnessing the best artist ever, working live in front of you, making masterpiece upon masterpiece. It all seems purposeful. No mistakes, nothing derivative, all original.  

I’m sure some people will roll their eyes at all this. That’s how I felt when my friend suggested we go to the park just to look at the sky. I thought I already knew what I’d see, because I had seen it before.

This is the illusion of over-familiarity. You see the sky so often that it’s hard to imagine some dedicated looking-time would show you anything new.

The truth is it’s unimaginable, which is why it sounds so lame. Your imagination can never show you what you’ll see when you actually put your back on the grass and look the sky in the face. You think you know, but you don’t.

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