Wide skies - Jo Carroll

By -
I love big skies - I now live in a top floor flat with a view across rooftops to the distant hills. And above - magnificent skies.

And I love words. I love the way they come out to play and surprise me. I love the way they creep up on me when I'm not looking. I'm a wordsmith - teasing away at a sentence until it does exactly what I need it to do gives me great pleasure.

But I run out of words when it comes to my skies. Which troubles me - I'd like to be able to use the stories in skies as metaphors. I'd like to use more adventurous words than lowering, or shimmering, or azure.

And so I'm going to do something I rarely do on this blog - give you pictures. Pictures without words. These are all taken from exactly the same place on my balcony. Please - can you find original ways to describe them?







Believe it or not, I do, occasionally, stop looking at my skies and do some writing. You can find out more at jomcarroll.co.uk

Comments

Umberto Tosi said…
Thank you for that reminder of daily magnificance that we all too often take for granted. Beautiful photos! Funny how, to us on our cozy planet, the sky seems immense and endless. Yet, travel a mere dozen miles upwards [fewer that many people drive to work every day] and our-egg shell sky gives way to burning stars, planets, asteroids and the infinite airless, cold blackness of the cosmos. We only have one sky. The sky is wild, but also our security blanket. We need to protect it now from those trying to set it on fire for power and profit.
24 February 2019 at 09:38
Sandra Horn said…
Thank you for these beautiful pictures. Alas! I share your dilemma about how to describe them afresh.
24 February 2019 at 14:38
Bill Kirton said…
Such beautiful shots, Jo. I'm not surprised you choose to look at rather than try to describe the effects. One thing that did spring to mind, however, was Marlowe's Faustus:
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop;
(NB I'm not religious - it just seems to me that, rather than trying pure description, metaphor may be the way to access their impact.)
24 February 2019 at 14:42
JO said…
Thank you all - and thanks, Bill, for the Marlowe quote. Maybe I should work on some metaphors (though I seem to get very caught on looking at the sky!)
24 February 2019 at 15:11
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