The "Listen To Your Wife" Show, Episode 244

My wife called and said I should go out and look at the sunset.

I was getting ready to do some recording—setting up mikes, wrestling with cables, setting levels, messing with camera angles, microphone stands. It was pissing me off a little, probably because my day’s meditation wasn’t yet finished.

But I decided, just this once, to take my wife’s advice and go for a walk. Maybe a little more chanting would make me more peaceful, anyway.

“It’s a total Maxfield Parrish sky” she said.

By the time I got to the top of the street, where the trees open up on a wide section of field, where you can see three hundred and sixty degrees of sky, I could see what she was talking about.

Everywhere I looked, I saw every different type of cloud ever created, huge, pink cauliflower giants, wispy grey smoke trail-y ones, swirly white comb-overs, thick white mountains, dark grey rain clouds.

In places it appeared like a layered cathedral of light and color and vaulted ceilings of moisture vapors, against brilliant blue. It truly was an artistic masterpiece. I thought of angels, heaven, the Sistine Chapel.

But the scale of it was so vast. What artist but God creates on such a huge scale? The answer is nobody.

What I was supposed to do with all that beauty? Part of me wanted to get up and fly through it, to rub myself all over the canvas of the sky in appreciation of the glorious brushstrokes of the Master.

But all I could do was stand there; slack-jawed, knowing that no puny photograph could do justice to the awesome hugeness of the art I was seeing in the sky. The canvas, after all, was the sky. No matter hot big you blow up even the most perfectly composed photograph taken by the largest diaphragm lens, it ain’t gonna be the sky.

I thought—and said—to Krishna, “this is great. You are the greatest artist.” But what was I supposed to DO with all that beauty? My gaze wandered from gorgeous cloud formation to gorgeous cloud formation, each one defying my ability to even begin to describe what I was seeing in words. You just had to be there.

I wanted to somehow share what I was seeing. It was just too amazing to keep to myself.

I stayed up on the hill, where I could see the whole sky (at least the part above my head) until the sun went completely down.

As it began to sink below the horizon, a brilliant, blazing jewel, its orange rays lit up huge banks of clouds on the horizon to the left and right.

Then I imagined those low bunches of clouds, their sun-sides basted with pink and orange, were disciples hunched forward to catch their spiritual master’s every word. The sun, their guru, had in fact created the clouds by his own power, and they were basking in his brilliance.

And just as there were an apparently infinite variety of clouds in that sky, each one had its own function, its own size, its own color, shape and location. Not every cloud can be the huge, muscular, pink cauliflower variety, poised to strike the ground with thunder and mighty rain. It takes a lot of different types of clouds to make a sky.