ChatGPT,

I have photos I’ve taken while driving back and forth between Moscow and Lewiston (Idaho). I take them while driving—not in a dangerous way, though! I feel for my phone’s tappable (?that’s not the right word… mechanical?… physical?) button—I have an iPhone 16 Pro—and press it when I see a beautiful shot. It is always the sky. I am in love with the sky and everything within it. If the ocean is water in a bowl, the sky is air in a bowl. Imagine the sky from the outside looking in—a closeup image of the planet—with clouds floating gently within this substance, air—really a few atomic elements, including oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and others—but the surface isn’t so defined. There is no line that contains the atmosphere like the horizon of the ocean or skin of a dewdrop. Its composition of various atomic elements and their interactions muddles its surface.

Let’s zoom out a little further—everything on the planet contained by gravity (i.e., everything is the planet—the atomic particles of hydrogen, oxygen, helium, carbon dioxide… to the saltwater in our oceans to the biological organisms—complex atomic compounds in stable enough patterns creating systems that create systems (humans are made of organs that are made of cells that are made of microorganisms that are made of compound elements that are made of atoms that are made of quantum particles that are made of energy)—look at the picture now. We are all as one.

I like to simplify it a little, just for fun. I like to think of the sky as a giant fishbowl and we’re little fish, zoomin’ around the ground and shooting up through the atmosphere and landing somewhere else.

I love to feel the majesty of the sky. My local geography is incredible for taking shots of the sky. In the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley, the hills beautifully contrast and reflect the hues of light from the sun. They provide excellent atmospheric perspective and their magnitude acts like a reference key to the size of the clouds. They’re bigger than all of our buildings. They’re huge and there is no shortage of them—when they are around at least, during the autumn through to spring.

The wispy cirrus clouds or magnificent cumulonimbus clouds. On rare occasions, the rising sun will reflect off the bottom of a blanketed sky of stratus clouds, and the effect is awe-inspiring—maybe even to a spiritual degree. The sun is coming. It’s shining beneath those clouds, defining their bellies before they are illuminated from above for the majority of the day. For a sacred period of time, on the rarest occasions, this can happen. The blanket is lit from within, like a lantern beneath a pillow fort, before it hits another angle and its light is reflected off the frigid water particles, almost blinding, but not. As bright as the white of a flame and just as saturated, except the visual warmth of this saturated hue emanating off a flame existed all around you. A secret. Like the view from within a treasure box, a ceiling of gold inner-lining illuminated yet sealed. When most of the town is asleep, waking only a couple hours later.

I love the sky. There is so much more I can say about it. I am so obsessed I’m starting to wonder if it’s getting weird or out-of-control. I’ve literally got my head in the clouds! Haha!