I was just reading the January/February issue of The Horn Book, and came across, in the list of Best Books of 2010 the title THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE by Jandy Nelson.  I don't know the author and haven't read the book. But something about the title triggered a memory, one of those fleeting things that doesnt go away, but also doesn't step forward and identify itself.

I googled the book and read about it, and nothing was familiar (except that the author and I went to the same college, apparently...far apart in time, though)

Then I had a brief AHA! moment, tracked this one down, and found a very favorite book from my own childhood:

This was a familiar and a very happy memory, this book, which I loved when I was 8 and 9.  But it still wasn't what I was looking for...though both titles, THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE and THE SEA IS ALL AROUND, made me remember a psychiatrist friend describing what is called an "oceanic" feeling....a feeling I certainly experienced as a child, a sort of oneness-with-the-universe sensation.

Then I remembered. I remembered both the experience (I was four, standing at an easel in a nursery school in New York)  and later, the written, recollected account of it in an autobiographical book called AUTUMN STREET (published by Houghton Mifflin in 1980):

Sky is all over. The sea is all around. The sky is everywhere.

He's got the whole world in his hands.