I want to do some quick administrative items in this post and then dive into poetry.
I won’t be posting every single day in this blog like I was back in April. April is a special month and honestly an exception. I have a 2.5-year-old and a day job that requires more than 40 hours a week from me. I wish I could spend more time reading and writing and posting, but it is just not possible. And I like to live in the realm of possible.
So, my ambitious, but more realistic goal is to post every Wednesday, and then post a Friday or Saturday. Two posts a week. I hope you all will journey with me in my travels through poetry, motherhood, and life, anyone is welcome.
Now, onto the fun stuff.
Last night, after almost 10 years of searching, my husband Ashish and I found the Aurora Borealis in our backyard, near Moulton Falls. The Aurora Borealis was becoming an enigma that we always have failed to see. Our first-year anniversary we traveled up to Quebec in 2014/2015. We drove as far as Saguenay, Quebec in search of the northern lights, in the middle of a snowstorm, with a little manual Hyundai that had a radiator leak.
Back in 2018, we travelled to Iceland with the hopes of seeing the northern lights, but never saw them.
And then there were the many times we drove and drove, here or there and everywhere, after reading articles that a solar flare or particles would allow the northern lights to touch close to where we lived, but never any luck.
And then last night, again an article stating there will be solar particles in the atmosphere. I fell asleep putting my daughter to sleep, and then was rudely woken up by Ashish at midnight. “Come on, wake up, come with me, let’s go see if we can see it.” I groaned, but I still went, because I knew this would finally be the night we would see it.
My MIL stayed at home with our daughter, and we drove north to Battle Ground Lake, and still couldn’t see it. Then we kept driving towards Moulton Falls, but there were no clearings. I caught glimpses of a haziness in the night sky, even though there were no clouds, and I could still see the stars.
The sky looked strange, but anyone just passing through wouldn’t have noticed anything. With the light pollution and being in cars with headlights, it would be too difficult to notice, unless one stopped along the road and turned everything off. We finally found a pull off and clearing and we turned everything off, climbed on top of our truck bed cover and laid down. Our eyes adjusted to the night sky, and we started seeing a grayish green light stretching and shifting across the night sky, upward and across. There was no pattern to the light, it moved and moved.
With the naked eye, the vibrant greens and purples are not fully apparent, but are more subdued. But when we took our phones out and started taking pictures, the colors actually came out more vividly. I was surprised by how different the phone captured the northern lights compared to what I actually saw.
No matter what, seeing it with my eyes was incomparable. 360 degrees of beauty. The frogs croaking in the marshes. Mist encroaching around us. Dogs barking in the distance. The stars a constant behind the shifting light. At the zenith point of the night sky, tendrils of lights extended downward, almost like a hand and fingers reaching toward the horizon line of trees.
The lights streaked, stretched, and contracted, slowly enough that I would shift my gaze to one point, and then shift back and the same place in the sky was slightly different, not quite the same as before. Again and again, nothing stayed the same.
It was not a quiet night. There were creatures shifting too, cars speeding past us with headlights on. A car sped past us every 3-6 minutes, taking our night vision away, and boring noise and vibration into our bodies. It wasn’t ideal conditions to see a natural phenomenon. I wished to be in Utah, in the middle of the Grand Staircase, where hardly a soul lives. I wished to be high on the mesa, at the entrance of crack-in-the-wall or sitting in the sand dunes that descend into Coyote Gulch, looking out to the night sky, surrounded by the ancient canyon formations of the Steps. In one of the most remote places on earth.
I want a lot of things, but at least I got the northern lights last night. At least I could see them, know that there is truly something natural about shifting our gaze upward at the night sky. It almost felt like I could float there, or that it was floating towards me. There was a welcoming, a message, a poem, something, telling me to be silent, telling me to move, to watch to change, to shift, to breath.
Northern Lights
We bent our necks and watched
the night sky shift and move,
in all its moving was dance,
in all its dancing was change,
in all its changing was vibration
in all its vibrating was poetry.
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