THE SKY IS A NEIGHBORHOOD

April 10, 2020

Exactly four weeks into quarantine, I was in my kitchen and glimpsed this image outside of my window. To many, this may have looked like nothing——a Rorschach inkblot test at best. To me, I was transported back to when I was a child making shapes in the clouds, and this time I was seeing a heart with wings. It felt like an otherworldly message saying that everything would be alright.

May 23, 2020

The gloom of the clouds was inexplicably surpassed with the news that the U.S. was on the threshold of reaching 100,000 deaths from Covid-19. The New York Times released a presentation on their front page to show this enormous loss. Gone were the articles and photographs that usually make up the front page. Instead, a list of obituaries and death notices from newspapers across the country.

“I wanted something that people would look back on in 100 years to understand the toll of what we’re living through.” —Marc Lacey, NYT national editor.

June 8, 2020

New York officially entered Phase 1 of reopening. The sky was shining in a kaleidoscope of colors.

“I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.”—Nora Ephron, Heartburn

June 15, 2020

On a dreamy day, the working rights of the L.G.B.T. community were solidified as the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In a 6-3 ruling, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote, “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.”

June 19, 2020

I don’t remember being taught the history of Juneteenth in school. I came to know the importance of the date a few years ago simply because this this holiday was programmed into the calendar on my iPhone. This year, the occasion felt even more poignant as protests continued around the world, the names of those murdered reverberating through the air——Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and too many others. As the clouds looked like steam rising in the sky, I thought of this book passage:

“It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”
—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

July 18, 2020

The sky was clear and blue the morning after the passing of John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Georgia Representative who was dubbed the “conscience of Congress.” Less than two weeks later, The New York Times released an article he had written shortly before his death, to be published on the day of his funeral. In it, Lewis writes:

“Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”

July 24, 2020

It feels so rare to catch a purple sky. Today, I did.

August 17, 2020

I saw the clouds going in an upward motion, backlit by the descending sun. On the first day of the Democratic National Convention, this view brought to mind a line from Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2016 convention speech, “When they go low, we go high.” In 2018, just after the release of her memoir, Mrs. Obama provided insights into that statement:

“‘Going high’ doesn’t mean you don’t feel the hurt, or you’re not entitled to an emotion. It means that your response has to reflect the solution. It shouldn’t come from a place of anger or vengefulness. Barack and I had to figure that out. Anger may feel good in the moment, but it’s not going to move the ball forward.”

August 28, 2020

The darkness of the sky looked multifaceted thanks to the light of the waxing moon. This evening, we all lost our King T’Challa, Chadwick Boseman, who had been silently battling colon cancer for four years.

“In my culture, death is not the end. It’s more of a stepping-off point. You reach out with both hands and Bast and Sekhmet, they lead you into the green veldt where you can run forever.”—Captain America: Civil War

September 11, 2020

What makes this 19th anniversary of 9/11 so intensely heartbreaking is that some of the individuals who died this year from Covid-19 were first responders on that tragic day. These were people who had developed ground zero-related complications, such as cancer and respiratory illnesses, that made them more susceptible to the coronavirus. As the sky shifted from nearly clear blue skies in the morning to swirls of dark clouds in the afternoon, I found solace in these words:

“Even the smallest act of service, the simplest act of kindness, is a way to honor those we lost; a way to reclaim that spirit of unity that followed 9/11.” —Former President Barack Obama on the 10-year anniversary of September 11th.

When I was a child, I would look up at the sky and see shapes in the clouds. A collie dog smiling to the left. An ice cream cone topped with two scoops to the right. The Emerald City castle from The Wizard of Oz floating directly overhead. Gradually over the years, my mind stopped transforming the clouds into imagined things, though my intrinsic wanderlust for the sky never faded.

Now as an adult living in New York City, among the soaring concrete structures, finding expansive pockets of the sky has become a reprieve from the daily commotion swirling at eye level. It’s a chance to return——however briefly——to that child-like sensibility through the celestial offering in the present. Sometimes, while paused on a corner waiting for cars to pass, I like to tilt my face upward to steal a few seconds to soak up those flashes of sun and sky.

Everything feels so different now.

New York entered lockdown in the middle of March, the days greeting me with compounding feelings of confusion, shock, and terror. From around the world, those sentiments were echoed and amplified. Nothing felt right. On walks to get groceries, the streets confronted me with a somber bleakness that was reminiscent of dystopian tales. Was this real?

During a particularly difficult afternoon in early spring, I went into my kitchen to make a pot of tea and my eye caught something out of the window. I grabbed my iPhone to capture the form before it drifted away. To many, this image may have resembled——at best——a Rorschach inkblot test. To me, I saw an otherworldly form of communication, as if the sky was comforting me and saying that it would all be okay. Because there, in a flurry of gray clouds, I saw a parting in the center shaped like a heart with wings.

On more days than I cared to count, many of which seamlessly blurred together these past few months, gazing at the sky through my apartment windows—luckily unobstructed——served as my sole connection to the natural world. Photos I started snapping of the sky became a means of marking the passage of this singular period.

Not every day was captured. More days felt blank than full. There were days that I would savor the sky while listening to the symphonic sounds of birds chirping beyond the pane glass. There were sleepless nights I broke down in tears while looking to the sky for answers. And there were both days and nights where I would turn my back on the sky and shun it from my sight, its gloom shrouding me like a cloak.

The collective trauma and pain, some born of this pandemic and many others unearthed by it, have etched a deep chasm in my heart that I doubt may ever fully go away. I don’t think I want it to. I don’t think I want this time in my life to leave me unchanged. I don’t think I should ignore this compulsory pause that has been seemingly speaking——perhaps shouting——into the stillness, “Is this really the way you want to keep going?”

One warm summer Sunday, I was listening to the Foo Fighters’ album Concrete and Gold, and a song that I had not heard in quite some time popped up: “The Sky Is a Neighborhood.” Against the backdrop of the times, the lyrics suddenly felt like an anthem. In a quest to find out its origins, I happened upon a Rolling Stone article with the band’s front man Dave Grohl. In the story, Grohl spoke of laying down one evening in the grass and looking up at the sky, prompting him to recall a video of Neil deGrasse Tyson in which the astrophysicist is asked to state the most astounding fact of the universe. The below answer he gave inspired the musician to write the song:

“The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures.

These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself.

These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems. Stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.

So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up——many people feel small because they’re small and the universe is big——but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity.

That’s really what you want in life. You want to feel connected. You want to feel relevant. You want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings-on of activities and events around you. That’s precisely what we are just by being alive.”

Since New York City started its gradual reopening in June, I have been fortunate enough to experience some of the things that make me immensely happy to call this place home——all through a renovated lens. Things like wandering through the galleries at my favorite museums, admiring the creativity and history of the pieces on display. Dining at restaurants, where I savor every alfresco bite and sip. The walks through Central Park, which usually culminate with a meditative seat on my favorite bench at the Pond. The kindness and warm greetings from fellow city dwellers, who time and time again remind me of the unwavering resilience woven into the fabric of our beloved community. Even riding the subway, which is sparkling clean now, makes me grateful to be a New Yorker.

But, most of all, I get to cherish the expansive pockets of the sky again in my city, outside the pane glass divide of my windows. Only now, when I look up, Dr. Tyson’s words reverberate deep within my core and serve as an essential truth that while we are indeed part of this universe, the universe is part of us. When I look up, I see myself. I see you. I see all of us.

Maybe that’s why as a child I was so fond of looking at the sky to find shapes in the clouds. Perhaps that’s why I continue to turn my face upward as an adult. Maybe I was seeking connection. Perhaps the sky was, too. Maybe I needed this time to find my way back to our neighborhood. Perhaps we all did.

Everything feels so different now…I hope it stays this way.

Photography by Rakhee Bhatt*

*All photos above were captured from my home windows between April to September 2020. While each image was cropped to fit the allotted space, none were altered or manipulated in any other way.

Originally published on October 1, 2020