One need not summit to see. To know what is above, one need only...

One need not summit to see. To know what is above, one need only lie on
the grass and look up, float on one’s back on a pond and look up, tilt
the chin toward the sky and look up. Any moment, a mountaintop. What do I know? Only that for
a moment I became the sky and touched everything at once. Only that
this possibility exists. The possibility to reach a state of
all-nothingness again. That somewhere way beyond the summit, sky, time,
death — these things are the same.

A series of essays on the sky for the Paris Review Daily concludes with this, on fear at the base of heartbreak and grief, voids and mountaintops, and the ways we aim our devotion.

What shape is the sky?

[Painting: Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857.]