I couldn’t capture today’s sky, but it was something like this…

It was another of those drive-off-the-road-gorgeous skies this evening. The kind that is completely impossible to capture in a photograph, and is more likely to be seen in a cheap painting for sale alongside velvet paintings of Elvis.

I can get lost in one of those skies.

Ripples and waves of grey cloud surging across the sky. A break just big enough to illuminate the edges, just big enough for the sea foam-salmon pink-blue of evening to peek through. The ragged shreds of dark cloud caught in shadow. And far out across the plains, a shaft of brilliant sun lighting sheets of mist shrouding the mountains.

These things only happen in bad paintings.

Or so I thought.

But the New Zealand sky is like the Andes Mountains. As a child, I was obsessed with the Andes–so impossible, so improbable in the National Geographic photos, I couldn’t believe they were real. And then I went there and climbed them, and I knew they were not.

It is the same with the New Zealand sky. To see it is to know it cannot possibly be real. It is a storybook caricature of a sky. It is a fantasy sky. It is a sky so dense with colour, you think it must have drained the rest of the world, casting everything else in black and white.

And I am so profoundly humbled and honoured to be able to call it my sky. My home.