O Beautiful for Spacious Skies

THE WORDS of the old refrain have been with us since childhood and too often, like the words of a familiar prayer or a great hymn, an intimate ballad, they lose their meaning by being sung and resung, told and retold. America. O beautiful for spacious skies. Old words, old tune, yet brave new words, brave new tune.

These are our skies, the skies of Arizona, one of the precious things about this big land of mountains and desert. These are the skies that cloak distant horizons, a fitting backdrop for such regal settings. There is strength in our skies and bigness and promise and might. There is poetry, too, and music and they have something sacred about them, like religion. These are the kind of skies that lift men's eyes, the kind of skies you should look at with your soul.

SKY STUDIES BY ESTHER HENDERSON

This is a big, spacious land, and the sky must be big and spacious to go with the land. And as the land changes so the sky changes, and the two go well together, both bearing the master touches of a Master Artist.

The skies of our land are ever-changing, yet changeless. Each day brings a new, bright sky, with new patterns in sunlight and clouds, enhanced by varying shades of blue. These are skies that make a proper canopy over a new land, where only yesterday, it seems, new trails were cut, new lands were found by the adventuresome people searching the new horizons.

But they are the ageless skies over the ageless land. They reckon their time in minutes and in centuries, and the centuries are but fractions of the minutes that mark their passing.

In the long ago before written history in our land, simple men looked to the sky, blinked their eyes and slow thoughts of wonderment crept through their simple minds. Men have always looked skyward with wonderment, pondering the enigma of the sky above them. From the skies have come security and guidance, and to the skies, since time began, the silent prayers of perplexed man have been directed.

We may never understand our skies but we can be comforted by them. We can derive inspiration from their beauty, and from them absorb strength and vision. In them we can lose our earthly thoughts and soar into heights beyond our ken. Men have always done so.

These, then, are some of the spacious skies of America. These are words in the old refrain but singing them again and again does not dull their meaning. Great, endless, changing skies over a great, endless, changing land! Big skies, full of big, billowy clouds! Beautiful skies, full of sunlight and promise! These skies reflect the moods of our land and the people who dwell thereon, and the land and the people reflect the majestic qualities of the sky. We'll never understand our skies, but we can always lift our eyes to them... R. C.