THE SKY IS THE THROAT OF EARTH
I woke at 3:30 and drove to DIA on vacant roads during those limbo hours between sleep and waking that seem darkest. The harsh overhead lights on the parking shuttle, the shuffling lines at security and boarding, all seemed a hazy dream. Once in the air, though, out the plane’s egg-shaped window—soaring seven miles above the earth’s surface—the sun rose and the world took on bright clarity. A huge storm had come through in the night, and as far as the eye could see the land was coated with fresh white. A turquoise sky pressed against it, making for one of those rare mornings you feel lucky to witness. All that snow shrouded the landscape’s details, yet its contours were brought into sharp relief. Peaks, valleys, mesas, plateaus, and prairies were evident as if knees lifted a blanket on a bed. At 35,000 feet, Earth’s foliage was cast in shades of gray. Meadows, frozen lakes, and rivers were open loops or squiggles of white. And then there were the squares, rectangles, circles, and grids—such straight lines—blatantly man-made scars—shouting that when it comes to landscape, nature creates no such lines.
The plane, though, soared through blue and blue and blue. The textures of the clouds below hinted at the wind’s grand plans. Occasionally it would jostle the plane, just reminding us, it seemed, of our insignificance.
In ancient Ayurvedic medicine, blue is the color of Vishuddha, the body’s throat chakra, seat of communication and connection, literally and figuratively. Located in the center of the collar bone, it radiates down to the heart and up to the eyes. Its Sanskrit name translates as “very pure,” and if your throat chakra is balanced, you can speak truths with kindness and love. If your throat chakra is balanced, you can speak personal truths with clarity.
The sky jostled the plane again. Clearing its throat, I mused, wondering what it might be preparing to say. Wondering at the voice of all that blue.
Words for blue are a late arrival in human history. In every language, it’s the last of the colors to appear. Some scientists believe that early humans were colorblind so could recognize only black, white, red, and later yellow and green. With no concept of blue, these early people had no words to describe it. The Greeks and Romans certainly had no word for it; in the Odyssey, Homer writes the sky and sea as “wine-red.” It’s mind-boggling to consider that for them these vast features of Earth could have appeared so differently. Or did they actually see blue, just had no word for it? And if there is no word for a thing, does it exist? Are we even able to perceive it? Or perhaps, by having no name, are we forced to perceive it fully?
At some point blue must have been realized, because, according to history texts, the barbaric Celts dyed their bodies blue for battle. Maybe some ancient folks avoided naming the color to thrust its evil associations from their minds. It was, after all, a time of myths. Women with blue eyes were thought to have loose morals. The color itself was once omitted from descriptions of the rainbow.
Yet the Vedas, the ancient Indian writings describing Vishuddha, were written between 1500-1200 BCE. Was blue added in later revisions? Or did it exist for them?
The ancient Egyptians had a word for blue. They were also the only ancient culture to produce blue dye. Lovers of the semi-precious stones lapis lazuli and turquoise, they invented the first blue pigment around 2200 BCE. “Egyptian blue” paint was made by mixing silica, lime, copper and alkali and was applied to stone, wood, plaster, papyrus, and canvas.
Later, in the Middle Ages, woad—a flowering plant native to the Mediterranean—was the source of blue textile dye, and was cultivated in England, France, and Germany. Towns and regions became wildly wealthy from it. Expensive to produce, it was used predominately by the rich, so blue became associated with nobility. Kings and their courts wore it. In the art world, blue was so expensive it was used on only the most important aspects of a painting. During the Renaissance, the Virgin Mary was almost always depicted in blue. Thus the color’s associations shifted to purity, humility, and the divine.
Ultramarine blue, known as “true blue,” first showed up in sixth century Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in Buddhist paintings, yet it didn’t really appear in European culture until the Renaissance, when it became a hallmark. Made by grinding lapis lazuli brought from Afghanistan by Italian traders, its modern name is derived from the Latin ultramarinus, meaning “beyond the sea.” Ultramarine blue was so expensive that some paintings were never finished; even Michelangelo couldn’t afford it, and Raphael used it only as a top-coat.
In the sixteenth century, the arrival of a blue dye from Asia called “indigo” changed the European textile trade because it was more stable and richer in color. The English, French, and German governments strove to block its import, yet indigo eventually replaced woad, shifting the continent’s industrial centers.
In the seventeenth century, the first cotton twill fabric dyed with indigo was produced in Genoa, Italy. Comfortable and easy to wash, it was perfect for laborers. The French city of Nimes copied and perfected this technology, becoming its greatest producer (“de Nimes” led to “denim”). Come 1873, German Levi Strauss improved the fabric and patented the use of metal rivets to reinforce the seams.
I could go on and on: blue has a vast and complex history. At least, that is, with humanity.
Dashing through the atmosphere on that plane, I wondered this: If an ancient person were to replace me there, what would they see? If they soared over an ocean, would all appear “wine-red”? What might it mean if humanity actually has adapted to seeing blue? Out that oval window the blue seemed to rise forever, though I knew it did not.
We live in the troposphere, the first of Earth’s five atmospheric levels. It reaches from terra firma up to between five and nine miles. It varies in width, narrower at the geographic poles and wider at the equator. Weather and the jet stream hang out there, creating further variations in its breadth. Ninety-nine percent of Earth’s water vapor resides in this layer, and the higher you climb, the more air pressure and temperature drop.
The next layer, the stratosphere, extends to thirty-one miles above Earth. It lacks the turbulence and updrafts of the troposphere, so jets tend to fly there. In the stratosphere, ozone molecules absorb high-energy ultraviolet (UV) light from the Sun, converting this UV energy into heat, thus this layer is warmer.
Temperatures plummet in the mesosphere. In fact, the coldest temps in Earth’s atmosphere (-130° F) occur near the top of this layer. Its border lies fifty-three miles above the planet, and its air is very thin. Most meteors combust there.
Outside that is the thermosphere, extending to 621 miles above Earth’s surface. This layer protects the planet by absorbing X-rays and UV radiation from the Sun. In doing so, its temperature can spike by hundreds, even thousands, of degrees. Many satellites orbit in this layer, as do the space shuttles and the International Space Station. It’s also where—as it does its filtering work—the Northern and Southern Lights appear in glorious shows.
The final layer, the exosphere, can seem more a part of outer space than the Earth, and because its air is constantly and gradually seeping out, it has no definite boundary. Scientific definitions of its reach range from 62,000 miles to 120,000 miles (about halfway to the Moon).
Zooming along in the stratosphere, the ground below the plane seemed to pass so slowly that it felt almost as if I wasn’t moving. Then, across the sky, I spied another jet moving impossibly fast in the opposite direction. I remembered how relativity works—the actual speed of two objects approaching one another being the sum of their speeds. This reminded me of an article about the astronaut Scott Kelly, who, with all his orbiting the Earth, up, up and away from gravity, had aged five milliseconds slower than his Earth-bound twin brother. This seemed to prove Einstein’s theory of space-time, specifically time dilation, in which time moves more slowly for objects in motion than it does for a stationary observer.
Yet, the closer you are to a gravitational mass—like Earth—the more time slows. Translated, our heads are ever so slightly older than our feet. A scientist named Chou found that frequent fliers actually age the teensiest bit faster than their non-airborne counterparts. He discovered that planes travel at high enough altitudes that the weaker gravitational field speeds the tick rate of a clock on board more than the craft’s high velocity slows it down.
Somewhere between a fast jet in the stratosphere and a waaay faster craft in the exosphere—somewhere amid all that blue—time distorts in opposite directions.
I peered out that oval window at a landscape shaped by this sky’s winds and weather over millennia. Great cultures had risen, dominated, and receded there. Dinosaurs had thrived and been extinguished there. All this white below had once been an ocean with tropical shores. An ocean perhaps perceived as “wine-red.” And if humans were still around in another thousand years, this sky—earth’s voice—might be perceived as yet another color. One I could not begin to comprehend. Or perhaps one I saw even then but could not name.
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