Empyrean
  
 
“It is easy to forget that you live in the sky—not beneath it, but within it. Our atmosphere is an enormous ocean, and you inhabit it. The ocean is made up of the gases of the air rather than liquid water, but it is as much of an ocean as the Atlantic or the Pacific. You may think of yourself as living on the ground, but all that means is that you are a creature of the ocean bed. You still inhabit the atmosphere like a sea creature does the water.”
  
             Introduction, A Cloud a Day, by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
  
 “No matter where you go, there you are.”
  
             Mary Englebreit greeting card
  
  
 At the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, 
 back before the first black-and-white lunar landing, 
 painted dioramas tried to teach me 
 tried to teach me a smidgen of evolution, 
 how sea creatures leapt or wriggled 
 onto the barren beaches of the world,
 trading fins for limbs, gills for lungs.
  
 I could not comprehend such leaving of home.
  
 First proto-centipedes; then, a hundred million years later,
 simple plants had the first field day, colonizing
 rocks and dust. At last, lagging
 by another thirty million years, fish broke through,
 climbed into the place of burning, and were changed
 by their yearning, their hunger for something
 beyond easy reach. That July of the Apollo 11 
  
 I was nine years old. I watched the grainy broadcasts
  
 with my best friend, Brenda. She lived on a farm. 
 We climbed ladders in the old barn, raided 
 the stone cellar for bottles of homemade root beer,
 walked dusty garden rows to claim gooseberries,
 tiny cherry tomatoes, and shiny black currents.
 Her mother set up T.V. trays to we could swim
 in the flow of history while noshing on popcorn.
  
 Later—-bored—-we put on swimsuits, screamed
  
 as we sprayed each other with ice cold water
 from the garden hose. Before the next summer,
 migrant again, my family sought a different climate,
 climbed into a rattling van, burst through
 December fog at the top of the Rockies. Descending,
 my ears popped. Time passed, I grew taller, grew
 breasts, learned I carried a salty ocean inside me
  
 even as I burned for the far-off idea of my own home.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz
   

My earliest ambition was to have a home I would not have to leave, yet in the intervening years I have come to know how leaving home is important to understanding it. How do we develop if we do not explore–mentally, physically, emotionally–at least a little bit of what else is out there? The protective shell is essential but is always, at some point, outgrown, perhaps just when it was getting comfortable. I suspect I shall always struggle with this paradox, meaning photographing clouds and shells over and over.