December 26th, 2012
I took this image this evening on my house's rooftop. It was a real beautiful sky; and it was one of the clearest shot I have ever took with my Canon 550D. But, as you can see, this picture has one flaw, which is our main topic in this article: Our vision have been bordered by telephone and electric wires.
This conclusion came to me today, but not on a single glance. I have been thinking about this many times. There are some incidents that provoke this opinion in my mind. The first one was when I was out on some natural place. I cannot recall where was I that time, but it was a wide, wide, plain field and I can see the sky so clearly, so limitless; that then I said to myself, When was the last time I saw the sky this big? I have been living in this earth for eighteen years; yet that day, I could not remember any recent day that I saw the sky and stunned by its greatness.
The second incident was when I was in the street, in the Lempuyangan highway, riding my motorcycle on this clear afternoon and saw the cloud shimmered with sun set light. Then, when I was riding, too, in Tamansiswa Street, suddenly looked up at the sky... Then, in my bedroom, as I accidentally put my eye on the the raining sky outside my balcony to find out that one of the most beautiful storm I had ever seen.
But, still, this visions are not borderless. In every sky saw today, in every street, our great heaven have been bordered with electric wires and buildings; the wideness of our horizon have been shrunk; the endlessness of the sky have gone. You see a piece of this beautiful phenomenon up above you, but merely a piece, as the image have been ruthlessly cut by city house's and advertisement banners. Like a frame on a painting, the electric wires restrict our vision.
And this is a sad, sad thing. Our ancestors in the Central Asian fields; Mongols, were living under the same sky. But theirs were unbound. The plain stepe had nothing to confine their vision which gave them an amazing view of our wide sky. A vision which must be incredibly indefinite enough to make them worship the neverending heaven.
I was so angry, today, and every time I realized this tragic fact. It is such a shame that us, nowadays, cannot see such view. We cannot see the sky fill our eyes with a bold, bold blue; then we cannot realized how infinite our sky is and take it for granted only. Wo do not admire the lapis lazuli blue that garnished with cotton-white clouds. We are not stunned with the gradation of turquoise-ivory-tosca morning sky. We do not even see the sensual shimmer of purple and magenta twilight.
We cannot understand and truly appreciate how wide, how limitless, how great our sky is; which finally led us to forget something so important: that we are so small in this great universe.
Imagine this picture without the wire. Houses will look so tiny under the greatness of the cloud.
I remember that, whenever I saw the sky in those incidents, I always feels so little, so small, so fragile against such majestic greatness. It was like the boldness and heaviness of the sky could just fall to me and crushed me into pieces. I could see how my position in this expanding galaxy is solely as an atomic dust that the nature could just despise. Nature is the ultimate, the almighty power in this world. I was nothing, nothing, against the it.
With a clear sky above us, us human will learn about humility. That there is always something bigger than us. No matter how strong we are, how smart we are; and so, we learn not to be glorious and imperious.
But with a bordered horizon, a cut heaven; us human will know nothing of these. We will only know ourselves. Will only think about ourselves. We never understand that there is a greater power outside our brain. And with it, comes pride and uppity. We think that we are the greatest and the strongest. Our vision bordered and blinded by our cockiness...
By now, the only limitless thing in this world is our sheer greediness and consumptive desires. It is so ironic that science and technology restrain our appreciation to the nature.
Still, the future can change. We can work on a future when the natural science comes in harmony with the nature. It is by reducing our dependence to technology and consumption that we can retrieve our unbound sky back. A person, who promote green lifestyle, can trigger a global human lifestyle to be more organic and less mechanic. Imagine what can happen if it is started by more than just one: you, Readers, and me. Let our yearning for a borderless blue be the motive of our every actions. So maybe one day, we will find a way to cut the wires and not our visions.
But until then, I will keep longing for a clear, unrestrained, infinite heaven above me.
