Love of the Day: Looking Up

'Lift up your eyes upon

The day breaking for you.'

Maya Angelou

London may not be full of the natural, untamed beauty that raises you out of yourself, lifts up your heart and refreshes you, that settles over you like a soft green veil - but it is full of man-made beauty along with the urban grit.  So much graceful architecture and history, creativity and interesting design around, it’s impossible not to marvel at it. And, every now and again, look up past it. 

Wherever you are in the world, whatever is going on in your life, you can always look up. The wide, wild sky is always there, with its changing colours and clouds. Its population of birds wheeling and living their fierce, free lives, independent of you or your human concerns. The tiny, high-up aeroplanes with their trails, escaping to somewhere far away and unknown.   It’s something I find oddly pleasing to remember. That there's one thing that you can do anywhere, as long as you are out of doors, to get a bit of different perspective on things.

You can look up in the countryside of course, but it’s particularly good if you’re ensconced in a city, with all its busy-ness and built-up streets - it can be so easy to get caught up with all the stuff going on at ground level. With a million signs, window displays, interesting places and people, traffic, adverts and lights everywhere, there’s a whole lot of distraction always there to suck you in.  (That’s not even counting the ever-present internal monologue that can take over from reality at any time, making the actuality of your environment all but invisible). 

Apart from the sky though, I love looking up at the funny little things to be found stuck on the tops of buildings. Weathervanes and decorations, domes and spires and little turrets. Interesting pieces of art or graffitti, tiles, signs and window-boxes. Sometimes there are whole gardens up there, or roof-top bars strung with fairy lights that you would never normally notice.  Sometimes there are people who have climbed out of a random window, just hanging out on a ledge above everyone's heads.  And there's also something to be said for just the loveliness of the outlines of buildings and trees against the sky. If I'm feeling particularly vague and floaty, I like just noticing the shapes that they make and pretending that I'll try and draw them one day (I never do).

Occasionally in the morning I get lucky and nab myself a seat at the front of the top deck on the bus (to any readers of the last post - my commute has now changed!) and then I get to have the unadulterated pleasure of being swung through the streets, with my music in my ears and all the good stuff spooling out before me, just looking up.