"The Floor of Heaven"

acrylic on canvas, museum wrap, 48"x60"

I love the sky. I never seem to tire of looking at it; noticing it's colors, the clouds, the light. I find it enormously restful. That it covers everything is deeply comforting. It's the one thing no matter where we live, we all share in common. We all live together and don't realize it, underneath one continuous stretch of airy gauze.

People who live in close connection to the earth have an intimate relationship with the sky. Why is that? Is it because it covers everything? and what comes from it or is in it, cannot be controlled?

Why is it that all cultures look UP for their connection to the numinous?

Why is it call ed so eloquently and movingly, 'the floor of heaven'?

In the opening pages of her beautiful poem "Leaf and Cloud", Mary Oliver quotes these lines from John Ruskin:

"We have seen that when the earth had to be prepared for the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined, in a subdued measure, the stability and the insensibility of the earth, and the passion and perishing of mankind.
But the heavens, also, had to be prepared for his habitation.
Between their burning light,---their deep vacuity, and man, as between the earth's gloom of iron substance, and man, a veil had to be spread of intermediate being;---which should appease the unendurable glory to the level of human feebleness, and sign the changeless motion of the heavens with a semblance of human vicissitude.
Between the earth and man arose the leaf. Between the heaven and man came the cloud. His life being partly as the falling leaf, and partly as the flying vapour."

From Modern Painters, vol. V, part VII, ch. 1

Perhaps that's it..it is the veil between ourselves and what is else.