A friend I hadn’t spoken to in a while recently asked me about how things are in Marfa, and I said something like “the sky has become a big part of my life.” I decided to keep a log for a day, modeled in part on The Awl’s (RIP) “Weather Reviews” which were not really about weather at all, but about careful seeing.
6:44 a.m.
Bedroom window, facing west. Grey, dull, heavy clouds. Birds making a racket in the trees outside. Shuffle to the front door rubbing my eyes like a baby and out into the street, where all is quiet until I hear the rumblings of a train coming.
I look east. The sky is like a stained glass window, light is streaming through cracked clouds, refracting, making basically every color except green. You know those phrases that get stuck in your mind, like an earworm? Every time I look at a good sunrise or sunset I compulsively murmur “Nature is the greatest painter,” which is something a landscape painter said to me once and at the time it sort of sounded like an excuse for why his paintings weren’t selling, like he couldn’t compete.
The train is roaring and tearing open the morning. I go back inside, put water on to boil for coffee, and when I look out again the sky is essentially normal, the stained glass has melted away.
8:38 a.m.
Lately it’s been raining so consistently in the afternoon that it’s a form of timekeeping. I was inspired to keep a sky log partly by Sho Shibuya’s daily paintings of the sky on each day’s edition of the New York Times. Shibuya’s project was a form of timekeeping during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when we were all losing track of time. It was also a time where we were all staring out the window a lot. Shibuya still paints the front pages of newspapers, but he’s largely moved on from the sky as a subject, focusing instead on the actual news of the day. Despite the old-fashioned, tactile canvas of the printed newspaper, I still feel like this represents a shift back from looking out the window to looking down at our phones. This log, for me, is an exercise in looking up.
Occasionally when the arrangement is just so, and the light hits it right, my brain gets scrambled about whether it is the sky that is the background, and the clouds foreground, or whether the clouds are the fabric and the bright marks of blue are like, bedazzled on. This is not a sensation I have ever experienced anywhere else.
Anyway, it’s partly cloudy.
11:07 a.m.
These cartoon clouds are some of my favorites.
2:10 p.m.
Rain - told you so. It’s the kind of rain where the drops seem very big, but oddly slow - like if you really, really concentrated, you could hear them individually.
3:40 p.m. - 6:33 p.m.
Things don’t seem to change much. The rain has stopped. Still pewter colored clouds to the north and east, sunny with puffy white clouds to the west and south. The sun seems to be moving toward setting faster than the clouds are moving anywhere.
But of course even when things don’t seem to change much, they always are. The desert is often conceptualized as a very static place, but tell that to all the green bursting forth from the ground after a week of daily rain. Or to the spadefoot toads emerging from months beneath the earth to chirp in the soggy arroyo each evening. So much is happening when nothing is happening, and so much is happening on its own non-human timescale. For me, as I imagine for others, a desire to attune myself to that fact is part of the draw of this landscape.
7:48 p.m.
There’s a ring of diffuse light all around the horizon, clouds above. I walk out to the western edge of town, by the cemetery. The color of the sky overhead now is opaque grey-blue, and the sensation of it is like a thing that is placed on top of us. Right now, the end of the world as we know it (the horizon) looks like the light that comes in beneath the edge of a blanket fort. The same way a blacklight turns white to neon, the post-rain sky seems to amplify everything green.
Living in cities full of tall buildings, there are so many competing shadows, so many tricks of light, and so many non-sky things to look at, that the very basic mechanics of what’s happening up there become totally obscured. Storms come out of nowhere. The moon’s location is always a surprise. Here, I feel like I can track it all, including time itself, though the scale can sometimes get pretty mind-boggling. I can usually make a relatively accurate guess at what time it is. The seasons are easily broken down into sub-seasons (as in, “the wind” of early spring). Even geologic time, so vast it’s pretty much entirely abstract to the human mind, is made somewhat more legible here. It’s easy, when looking at the Davis Mountains, and the big sky above, to imagine and remember that this area was once the bottom of the ocean.
8:46 p.m.
I drive out to the dump, which is a wonderful place to watch a sunset, as it’s slightly elevated above town. I’m a little late getting out here, and the sun is just a pink-orange semicircular glow. Its reach doesn’t extend far tonight - the clouds are too heavy, the curtain is falling.
The sunsets in West Texas are all they’re cracked up to be – like the Vermont leaves in October, or German beer, they are highly and yet appropriately hyped. Even ones like this, which are relatively unspectacular, are such good reminders of living in physical space.
I used to have trouble with cardinal directions. When someone told me to “head north,” for example, I was pretty much already lost. That isn’t a problem here. You always know, if not where you are, at least where the sun is. And it’s all so still, the horizons are so uninterrupted, that you can actually see the motion of the sun going down. Though of course, it isn’t actually the sun that’s moving – it’s us.
9:19 p.m.
Dark, no stars and no moon visible. A flash of silent lightning.
This exercise in looking up and out is really an exercise in attention, which I can’t help thinking is a type of exercise we’re all in need of, myself included. When so much of everyday life can make us feel like attention is stolen, or slipping away, or passive, any form of taking it back and directing it with intention can be powerful. I’m a believer in the adage “Love is what you pay attention to” and the sky for me is a physical manifestation of how much there is worth paying attention to – and loving.
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