The Weight of the Sky

In the high deserts, the sky does not merely sit above the earth; it presses down with a physical, almost muscular weight. We often speak of the atmosphere as something light, a mere breath of air, yet anyone who has stood beneath a gathering tempest knows the truth. The air thickens. It becomes a heavy, velvet curtain that demands to be reckoned with. There is a strange, quiet violence in how the light changes just before the rain begins, turning the familiar dust and stone into something ancient and unrecognizable. We are small things, really, standing in the path of these grand, shifting moods. We build our lives on the assumption of permanence, forgetting that the ground beneath us is merely a canvas for the weather’s next whim. When the clouds break and the light returns, it is never quite the same landscape we knew an hour before. What remains of us when the storm decides to move on?

Steve Hirsch has captured this shifting tension in his work titled Boynton Canyon Storms. It is a reminder of how quickly the world can rewrite itself in the presence of a passing cloud. Does the earth feel lighter once the rain has finally fallen?