Aurora, or: What Really Matters

For the last couple of months or so, I’ve been meaning to write a blog post. I was going to call it “Unsocial Media”, and it was meant to have been all about why I haven’t posted much for most of this year. I was going to be eloquent, and witty, make excuses and give explanations, be philosophical, tell you all about the important things in life…

But then, last night, this happened.

It was literally awesome.

I’ve been hoping and wishing to see the Aurora Borealis for years. It’s been a bucket list item for me. I’m on an Aurora Watch mailing list that sends me notifications with yellow alerts and red alerts when there’s likely to be one in my area. But I’d never actually seen them. Until a couple of days ago, when one of the Offspring came home after dark and dragged me outside: “You gotta see this!”

Truth be told, I needed to have them pointed out to me. I’d been expecting and looking for something spectacular, bright, red-and-green, undulating in the sky exacly north of here. But what I saw were some brightish, whitish, streaky things that I could have easily mistaken for clouds, in the Eastern sky, no less.

That’s them? That’s the Northern Lights?

It was. And once I knew what I was looking for, I saw them. All over the sky, not just the North like I expected. They come and go so quickly, you can miss them if you don’t pay attention. And to the naked eye they’re mostly white, at least the ones I saw were.

But they do dance. And they are spectacular. And there are colours – just not quite what I had expected. In fact, it’s quite possible that this was not actually the first time I’ve seen the Aurora Borealis; in all my times of hopefully gazing north, I might well have been looking right at them, and not known what I was seeing.

Last night, I was ready with my fancy camera and tripod. And I caught pictures of them, and the camera saw things my eyes did not and showed me the colours. But that’s not even that important. I sat outside on my balcony for more than an hour, wrapped in a hoody and a blanket and a poncho, and I think I had a big huge silly grin on my face for almost the entire time. I saw the Aurora.

So I’ll spare you my eloquence on that other stuff, there is no need for it.

Because this, my friends, is Life, the Universe, and the Things That Really Matter. It truly was awesome.