| Apr. 18th, 2010 @ 11:36 am auroras |
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I like to imagine myself 1000 years ago, inhabiting the life of some lonely polar resident, some solitary explorer cast asunder from his crew, wandering a desert of ice, the cold eating it's way through the fur lined skins that passed for clothing. In my imagination these wanderings occur at night, when darkness fills the land and is so thick and so seemingly permanent that light, however thin that promise might seem, is a distant memory, some fleeting thought left over from a past life. For there in my wanderings, when my own sense of solitude, of bleak desperate despair, reaches it's zenith a vast apparition, green in color, appears before my eyes, filling the sky, it's undulations beckoning me, the movements of a belly dancer from the deepest recesses of my fantasies.
I wonder what it would have been like to experience things before science had all the answers, before thought lost the duality of good and bad, before photos and videos informed of what was to come, of what was to be. I wonder how I would have felt in those first moments when a brilliant green light lit up the sky and danced before me? Would I have thought it a courting God? A celestial bush, it's flames made all the more grander by the twinkle of the stars? Surely I would not have felt fear or trepidation, for how could something so beautiful be the fore bearer of dismay? These are the things that consume me on nights such as the past few, on nights when the sky becomes consumed by auroras, endless ruminations on others experiences.
We have been blessed lately, solar activity has hit a peak and clear skies have let us see a bit of the majesty, of the green, of the blobs. Vast auroral rainbows, of green and red and purple, have filled the night sky, their promise of gold and treasure spilled out for all to grasp, abandoned by the leprechauns, left for us. I have gone out two nights and two nights have been rewarded with multiple auroras, filling and dissecting the sky, claiming ownership of the heavens and my imagination. At night, when I close my eyes and darkness sets in, my last image is of them, their beauty burnt so deeply that my mind can't quite release them. For this is Antarctica, this is winter, this is beauty.
This past thursday. I didn't take this photo, but it is representative of what I saw. |
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mananath's journal
