Metaphors involving the sky have great appeal. The lyrics of the song "Torn" (by Anne Preven), for instance, include:

Illusion never changed
Into something real
I'm wide awake
And I can see
The perfect sky is torn

So likewise my eye was caught by a lyrical description of meditation in the first section of the delightfully-named Breath Sweeps Mind, a collection of readings subtitled "A First Guide to Meditation Practice". From an excerpt of Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, "Bringing the Mind Home":

The Buddha sat in serene and humble dignity on the ground, with the sky above him and around him, as if to show us that in meditation you sit with an open, sky-like attitude of mind, yet remain present, earthed, and grounded. The sky is our absolute nature, which has no barriers and is boundless, and the ground is our reality, our relative, ordinary condition. The posture we take when we meditate signifies that we are linking absolute and relative, sky and ground, heaven and earth, like two wings of a bird, integrating the sky-like deathless nature of mind and the ground of our transient, mortal nature.

The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life. For it is only through meditation that you can undertake the journey to discover your true nature, and so find the stability and confidence you will need to live, and die, well. Meditation is the road to enlightenment. ...

(cf. TheBrink (2001-04-13), SkyLights (2003-05-25), Wherever You Go, There You Are (2008-10-26), Coming to Our Senses (2009-01-01), ...) - ^z - 2009-02-26