Most people that know me know that I absolutely adore the sky and essentially everything about it. I could look at the sunset or stars every night and never grow tired of the changing colors or constellations. The sky with all of its charming qualities is my favorite thing in the world, and if I could spend my entire day watching the way it alters in a million different ways, I wouldn’t hesitate to.

The sky holds so much unknown beauty and we are only capable of seeing such a minuscule part of it. The clouds everyone sees and under appreciates are usually about 5 miles away from where we stand on earth whereas stars are more than4 light years away.

As a kid, I would always lie out in my backyard with the grass tickling my legs and watch the clouds change shape. I would always see things like bunnies or puppies while other kids would see something completely different. It always amazed me how we could interpret the same cloud as something different, like an abstract piece of art in a museum. Even as a child I could understand how much I didn’t understand about the earth and atmosphere and how small I was in this huge world.

The other night I stayed up watching the stars with my friend and her father, dipping our toes in the lake and staring up at the sky talking about how the Little Dipper pours into the Big Dipper, how Venus shines brighter than all the other planets in our galaxy, and how the North Star always seems to stay North in the sky no matter what time of year it is because it’s located almost directly over the North Pole. I learned about how the Seven Sister’s constellation looks like a tight cluster of stars to us, but they are really thousands of light years apart. We talked about twilight and how in the summer the dark purples and blues seem to last hours after the sun goes down. We all have such a strong fondness for the sky and all it is made up of, and how little we are really able to see.

Now, I still understand how small I am, but how I am still important to the world. The ants that crawl under my feet are just as important as the stars that shine through my window at night. Planets and galaxies look teeny tiny to us, but even the smallest star is 167,000 kilometers. The sky is made up of beautiful blues, pinks, oranges, yellows and is full of stars, planets, clouds and galaxies that all change and arrange themselves into a beautiful masterpiece above us. I love the sky because every time I look at it it never fails to amaze me, but it also makes me accept how small I am and how I am still an important part to life's masterpiece.

So I chase the sunset whenever I can; I let my mouth drop every time the sky explodes into purple and pink; I take a million pictures of the moon even though they never quite do it justice. I never fail to appreciate the beauty of what the sky gifts us with because every little thing that makes up the sky and the Earth is a work of art.