When my father was dying, everyone around me suddenly became a mystic. There at the hospice, they started telling me things like that the realms of the living and the dead were closer together than I might think. That I would be able to feel his spirit around me, whenever I wanted, if I only tried hard enough. I was porous again, like a child, like someone new to this world. I was ready to believe in things. Even things I didn’t believe in.

So after they took his body away to some place I don’t let myself think about, I looked for him in nature, in the woods or in wide open fields. These seemed like the right places to look. They were purer than other places. I tried to find him there.

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When I say purer, I mean that these places seem closer to god, or heaven, or the other side—whatever you want to call it. But what makes me think that? What does that even mean?

I guess it’s that these seem like places to go if you want to feel close to the beauty of this world and the idea that there might be something even more beautiful beyond it. But not the other people still in it. 

The purest places have the fewest signs of being touched by others. They are quiet in their lack of human noise. Quiet enough to trick yourself into believing they belong to only you. Or you belong to them. Inside of them. 

Quiet enough to hear my father, feel him somehow, if he did speak to me. No one else around to tell me that there was nothing there. That I had heard nothing. 

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When I think of places so pure that you might be able to feel the presence of lost loved ones, so pure you might be able to connect to the spiritual world—whatever that means—as if through a portal within them, there’s one in particular that comes to mind: an impossibly green field under an equally impossible blue sky. Gently drifting clouds that look like they would be soft to the touch, if you could ever reach them. Rolling hills and then mountains beyond. A horizon untainted by any signs of human life. 

This is not a place I’ve ever been, but I still feel like I know it, even better than places I have felt under me. I feel, in some way, that it belongs to me. Or that I belong to it. Inside of it. 

It’s the image that adorned the desktop of our family computer throughout my childhood. It’s the image that is still the background of my father’s work laptop, just one machine that has outlasted him. Overdue: Checkup, the laptop says when I open it the week after he goes, alone in his empty home office. Your password has expired, it tells me. I see notifications from a former colleague sharing the news of his death on LinkedIn. Check It Out!, they implore me. Join the Conversation! I click away these messages. I return to the perfect green field, the perfect blue sky, where it feels impossible that anything has ever ended, or ever could end. 

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That image, I know now, has a name. Actually, it has two. Its photographer, Charles O’Rear, originally licensed it to the media company Westlight, later acquired by Corbis, under the title Bucolic Green Hills. Microsoft then purchased the image from Corbis, selected it as its default wallpaper for the Windows XP operating system, and renamed it Bliss. 

But if I were to name it, I would have called it Eternity. This is what I think of when I look at it.  

Even though they look nothing alike, Bliss makes me feel the same way as Renaissance paintings of angels do, as stained glass in a church does. There’s something sacred and eternal about their beauty. Something untouchable. Seemingly serene—but. There’s also something about them that makes me a little scared. 

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Eternity used to scare me—how long it went on. I say used to, but it still does scare me. And it still goes on. Nothing should be in the past tense. 

When I was a child, I couldn’t stop thinking about death—the finality of it. But I was equally consumed by the notion of the afterlife, its endlessness. I was just learning about heaven and hell, during the brief period when my family went to mass every week before all of a sudden we just stopped. I didn’t understand how the people around me could just walk calmly out of the church and back to their lives every Sunday carrying this knowledge, when death was imminent, when heaven and hell were looming; I didn’t know how anyone coped. 

I didn’t want life to end. But I was also afraid of forever. 

It was worst at night, when I was trying to fall asleep. I couldn’t shake the thought of either, irrevocable death or floating forever through an afterlife—even if that afterlife was the good one, the most beautiful place I could ever imagine. Both of these notions felt too close to me, alone in the dark of my childhood bedroom. 

My father sat me down one day, tried to comfort me, after hearing me cry at night. He told me that I didn’t need to worry because I would live a long time. “Longer than me,” he added, with the levity of a joke. But that only made me cry again, harder. I don’t know why he thought reminding me of his mortality would assuage fears of my own. 

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My cousin is five years old when my father dies. “Where’s Uncle Tom?” she used to say when she came to our house, until she found him. When I go back to the city after the funeral, I ask my mother if my cousin still looks for him. “Not anymore,” she says. “I think her mom told her about heaven.” 

Heaven is a place you go when no one can find you anywhere else. A place you can exist when you can’t exist here. It’s convenient in that way. 

I wonder how my cousin thinks of heaven, the place she’s told my father went. Maybe like how I pictured it: the golden clouds, the searing light of those Renaissance paintings. 

Or maybe a perfect green field. An impossibly blue sky. 

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Unlike those paintings of angels and stained-glass windows, the photo of Bliss was not created. It was captured.

Many have suspected that the image is not a real place. Or not one real place. That it was edited, enhanced to achieve its unearthly beauty. Or that it was multiple images spliced together to create one more perfect than what nature can offer. 

But Charles O’Rear insists. “You’re all wrong,” he tells his disbelievers in a retrospective web documentary for Microsoft, called The Story Behind the Wallpaper We’ll Never Forget. “It’s the real deal,” O’Rear says. “What you see is what you get.” The saturated colors are attributed to the combination of the specific camera, lenses, and film O’Rear used, not any kind of post-production editing. 

“I didn’t ‘create’ this. I just happened to be there at the right moment and documented it,” he’s quoted as saying in an article for the Napa Valley Register. 

If Bliss is a real place, then where is it? Many have speculated about the image’s location, as indistinct and ideal as a dream. Theories have been as far-flung as Ireland, the Palouse prairie, New Zealand, England. Portugal, Switzerland, Germany. It could be nowhere; it could be anywhere. Just as easily where you are as where you want to be. 

But in reality, the image was taken in Sonoma County, California. The original site of Bliss has since been converted into a vineyard. A blogger named JW van Wessel scouted the location and found the precise coordinates (38°15′00.5″N 122°24′38.9″W, if you’re curious). On his WordPress blog, Van Wessel posted pictures not only of the site of Bliss, but also its immediate surroundings. His photos show that if one stands back just a little, you can see everything that was cropped out of Bliss: the road running in front of it, folding out forever in both directions. The houses dotting the distance. The alien presence of an electric tower right behind you.  

In the Microsoft retrospective, O’Rear says that the road by Bliss is notoriously dangerous. Narrow and winding with a high speed limit. That there are likely more accidents there than any other road in California. That it is nearly impossible to stop and admire the view, as it exists now. 

In 2006, ten years after O’Rear’s original photo was taken, the Stockholm-based art collective Goldin+Senneby recreated Bliss in a new photograph of the same location. Their version, titled After Microsoft, reveals the same setting as less than edenic. Underneath a gray sky, the perfect green hills have been blighted by brown—by rows and rows of grapevines, strung together by wire, orderly as soldiers or schoolchildren. The land now obeys, rather than just exists. It belongs to someone. It has all been so evidently touched. 

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Critic John Berger believed a particular kind of field in nature—the “ideal field”—could contain the same proportions as one’s own life. This kind of field “displaces awareness of your own lived time.” Its center “gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognizable as your own.” Berger’s criteria for a field “mostly likely to generate [this] experience” is the following:

1) a grass field, with “boundaries which are visible.”

2) a field on a hillside

3) not a field in winter

4) a field “which is not hedged on all sides.”

It’s uncanny how this is almost the perfect description of Bliss. Almost. But I believe Bliss has no boundaries, visible or invisible. I believe Bliss and boundaries to be diametrically opposed.

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My father dreamed of being a park ranger. Instead, he stared at screens all day. 

When I was a child, he used to come home and display what seemed like preternatural knowledge of what I did every day. If I had fallen and cut my leg on the playground, he knew. If I had gotten in trouble for talking over the teacher, he knew. If I had won a prize for meeting my reading goal, he knew. When I asked how, he would always say, “A little birdy told me.” He said this so often and so easily that I believed him. I used to picture a little blue bird sitting at his window, singing him a song of what I had done each day. 

In his job, he analyzed the sales of consumer-packaged goods—terms that meant nothing to me as a child. When people asked me what my dad did, I would say, “Something with computers.” That’s as far as I understood. 

I remember visiting his work for the first time. Learning where he went when he was not home, when I could not see him. I remember running down a long hallway. Going to his office. Being shocked there were no windows. Nowhere a little birdy could have spoken to him. No access to the world outside at all. Only his computer with the eternal green field. 

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In the Microsoft retrospective documentary, O’Rear reflects on the process of the company acquiring his photo. “I have no idea what [they] were looking for,” he says. “Were they looking for an image that was peaceful? Were they looking for an image that had no tension?”

When my father was dying, everyone told me it was okay, because after, he would finally find peace. There would be no tension: everything that hurt about living in this world, the pain of the cancer that had ravaged his body, would finally be released. In this way, we make a consolation prize out of death. Like sending people to heaven when we can’t find them in the world. 

An article for the British magazine Amateur Photographer speculates why Microsoft might have chosen the Bliss image as the XP background: “It’s attractive, easy on the eye and doesn’t detract from other items that might be on the screen…it’s an unusually inviting image of a verdant landscape and one that promotes a sense of wellbeing in desk-bound computer users.”

Microsoft employee Brian Peterson is quoted in an article for The Spokesman Review explaining that the company chose the image because it “illustrates the experiences Microsoft strives to provide customers (freedom, possibility, calmness, warmth, etc.).”

I think of my father at work, a desk-bound computer user. All that time, alone, in his windowless office. His days inside a screen. Analyzing the patterns of things we consume: what, how much, and why. The ways in which they can bring us closer to the semblance of freedom, possibility, calmness, warmth, etc. 

I imagine him switching off his computer at the end of the day. The blue sky and green hills out with a blink. Bliss would be gone just like that.

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I think of my father in the woods, on the walks we would take in the nature center the next town over, where everything felt peaceful. Where there was no tension. Nature was pure, he told me on one of these walks. Animals were pure. That was the word he used. What does that mean, exactly? I asked him. It means they have no motive other than being alive, he said. 

He wanted to get closer to the world. But not the people in it. 

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It’s believed that Bliss is the most viewed photograph in history. It’s something that unites you to billions of other people you’ve never met. Chances are, it’s a type of common ground between you and most strangers—a place you both know, despite never having visited. It’s leaked into the collective unconscious, almost an archetype. We know that sky without ever having stood beneath it. We know that field without ever having walked through it. 

It has untethered itself from the confines of the Microsoft XP desktop, floating into the rest of the world. An article for The Next Web claims that O’Rear himself has seen the image in a Thai restaurant window and in the background of a TV interview with the president of Venezuela. One might find a way to make a joke here, about never knowing where you’ll find Bliss. 

“I think it’s going to be around forever,” O’Rear said in a 2014 article for CNET. “Anywhere on this planet right now, if you stop somebody on the street and you show somebody that photograph, they’re going to say, ‘I’ve seen that somewhere, I recognize that.’” 

I have no doubt that Bliss will outlast me. That it’s going to live a long time. Longer than me. 

It stands to reason—if it was not created, it cannot be destroyed. 

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“There it was! My God, the grass is perfect! It’s green! The sun is out; there’s some clouds,” says O’Rear in the Microsoft documentary when he recalls the moment he shot Bliss. 

This line reads to me like famous last words, the kind you might find in a book collecting such quotations. Something final, fulfilled—yet also anticipatory—about them. 

I don’t know what my father’s last words were, not his official ones. By the time I got to the hospital, he was unconscious, his body finally surrendering to the cancer that had claimed it. He was surrounded by computers, machines, things beeping and blinking in the rhythm of hearts, but they weren’t alive. 

I had a hard time believing that this was the end. Was it an image that was peaceful? An image that had no tension?

As we waited for him to be transported to the hospice, it was difficult to take in the scene in front of me. To see my father in the state he was in. To accept it all as real. Like my mind wanted to protect me from absorbing this image into my memory. 

But what I do remember is how beautiful, almost impossible, the views from his window were—rolling hills and distant mountains that felt so disconnected from the declining mid-sized city we were in, a place that is no one’s destination. The views didn’t look like where we were. Looking out at them, we could have been anywhere. 

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I keep walking in nature, trying to lose myself in it, trying to belong to it. Inside of it. I haven’t found him yet. I haven’t been able to feel him speak to me. But I keep looking for him, the way I keep looking for a field that green, a sky that blue. One that immaculate. That divine. Endless and empty enough to hold everything I’m searching for. All the things I haven’t seen but I’m told are out there. All the things I’m told are real.