Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Do you remember the scene in War and Peace (I know, I read it a long time ago, too) in which Prince Andrei, lying wounded on the field of Austerlitz, looks up at the sky and experiences a kind of awakening?

Well, there’s an organization that hopes we will all connect with the sky with that sort of attention and feel renewed.

“It began with a cryptic e-mail from an unfamiliar source,” writes Jan Brogan at the Boston Globe.

“ ‘Look at the sky as often as you can — for about 21 days. I’ll contact you again in 3 wks.’ It included a link to a website with clouds.

“Signing off with ‘More Light,’ this guy could have been a total whack job. But something about the writing said this had nothing to do with UFO sightings. I clicked in.

“The website was ForSpaciousSkies.com. The man who sent the e-mail, Jack Borden, a former Boston television reporter, had had an epiphany as he looked up from a meadow one day in the mid-1970s and saw the sky as if for the first time. He has been on a mission to educate people about sky awareness ever since.

“ ‘When we are unconscious in regard to our surroundings, we are irresponsible to them,’ says Borden, speaking of that mission now.

“It began with a series of televised man-on-the-street interviews. Borden stopped pedestrians, covered their eyes, and asked what the sky looked like. Most had no clue. They were rushing through their lives without ever looking up.” More.

I want to take up the challenge, pay more attention to the sky. I’m good about this when I go out early in the dark for my walk and take a deep breath of the moon and stars, but I should be more attentive more often during the day. I think my hiking and skiing and sailing friends must get sky vitamins  all the time. They probably don’t even think about it.

I include a couple pictures from times I did pay attention during the day.