Lie on the grass. Get down, fall over on your back, spread your arms. There is no other way to sink so tightly and dissolve in the blue sky than when you lie on the grass. You fly away and drown right away, at the very moment you roll over and open your eyes. This is how a lead weight sinks if it is put on the surface of the sea. This is how a tense balloon (well, say, a weather balloon) drowns when you let go of it. But do they have the same impetuosity, the same lightness, the same speed as the human gaze, when it is drowned in the boundless blue of the summer sky? To do this, you need to lie on the grass and open your eyes.
Just a minute ago I was walking along the slope and was involved in various earthly things. I, of course, also saw the sky, as you can see it from the home window, from the window of the train, through the windshield of a car, over the roofs of Moscow houses, in the forest, in the gaps between trees and when you just walk along a meadow path, along the edge ravine, along the slope. But this does not mean to see the sky. Here, along with the sky, you see something else earthly, closest, some detail. Every earthly detail leaves on itself a particle of your attention, your consciousness, your soul. There, the trail goes round a large boulder. A bird fluttered out of a juniper bush. There the flower bends under the weight of the toiler-bumblebee. "Here is the mill. It has already fallen apart."
You go, and the surrounding world supplies you with information. This information, in truth, is not intrusive, not depressing. It doesn’t look like a radio that you don’t have to turn off. Or to the newspaper, which in the morning you cannot help but skim. Or on the TV, from which you do not tear yourself away due to the apathy that gripped you (under the influence of all the same information). Or on the signs, advertisements and slogans that dot city streets. This is a different, very tactful, I would even say, affectionate information. It does not increase the heartbeat, nerves are not depleted, insomnia is not threatened. But nevertheless, your attention is scattered by rays from one point to many points.
One ray to the chamomile (not to tell fortunes in old age - and here is a far-reaching chain of associations), the second ray to the birch ("a couple of whitening birches"), the third ray to the forest edge ("when the foliage of the damp and rusty mountain ash bunch "), the fourth - to a flying bird (" The heart is a flying bird, in the heart is aching laziness "), and the soul began to shine, split up, alone, as is the case in moments of creativity, in minutes, probably, of prayer, and even when you are alone with the bottomless sky. But for this you need to fall over into the summer grass and spread your arms.
By the way, the sky has enough depth for you even if white hordes of clouds move slowly and harmoniously across the sky. Or if these clouds bask in the blue, motionless. Better, of course, is the pure blue abyss.
Are you lying on the grass? Swimming in the sky? Are you flying or falling? The fact is that you yourself have lost boundaries. You became from the sky, and the sky became from you. It and you have become one and the same. Either you fly, ascending, and this flight in impetuosity is equal to a fall, or you fall, and this fall is equal to flight. The sky can have neither top nor bottom, and you, lying in the grass, feel it perfectly.
The flower meadow is my cosmodrome. From here, from the flower meadow (where only a bumblebee buzzes), the concrete runways on which clumsy metal planes roar seem pitiful. They roar with powerlessness. And their impotence lies in the fact that they cannot satisfy even one millionth of a percent the human thirst for flight, let alone his thirst to merge with the vastness of the sky.
