A momentous occasion last night – the northern lights. A group of us sat around a small fire on the lakeshore, picking out constellations, satellites, and shooting stars. As the sun passed barely beneath the horizon to the north, green bands stretched out tendrils reaching skyward. They were subtle in presence and motion, undulating faintly, and flowing like a creek across a beach. As one tendril would diminish into the horizon, another would rise at its side. After less than ten minutes they subsided, leaving just the faint luminescence of the lurking sun, teasing the night of its ensuing return.
And now this morning, things are distinctly calm, or perhaps it is just my mind that has subsided into the current of the life around me. I sit in the middle of the field here at work, nearly surrounded by forest, the lakeshore glassy-calm in front of me. A doe picks her way through the salal along the edge of the field. The voice of a brown creeper falls from the heights of a doug-fir like a lazy clump of moss. Various crossbills pipe away atop the conifers, and I strain to decipher their distinct calls. There are possibly four subspecies of this bird here, each with slightly distinct vocalizations, and each with a slightly different crossed bill, which is specialized to prying open the differently sized cones of the various native conifers.
As I stare into the treetops, picking out, identifying, and observing birds, at moments it becomes silent enough that the faint tapping of the tiny white flower petals dropping from the wilting bush fifteen feet away is all I hear. Like most things so delicate, the silence is ephemeral, and seconds later it gives way to the restless crossbills. Only hours after watching the northern lights dance below Polaris, the silent sunrise explodes across the mountainside, welcomed by an awaiting chorus of birds. I can feel time dissolve into a stream of unimportance. I watch the sunrise drift down towards the lake. My eyes wander to the swallows as they swirl around. Orange ripples dance across the lake, and soon a soft breeze accentuates the crisp turns in the swallows’ flight.
Once the sun peaks above the mountains on this side of the lake and washes the field in daylight, the birds quiet down and focus on foraging. Once again time slowly precipitates upon the day as people emerge from their cabins full of sleep and wander to the dining hall for coffee.
Regardless of their duration, experiences such as these remind me that so much endlessly awaits us. I believe I can find no better way to find the power latent in each day than to seek these moments, for once they have passed, it seems only then we realize they can scarcely be described as a moment at all.
