It appears that we have been denied, once again, sight of the aurora that the weekend’s solar flares produced. Supposedly a few folks in town, just enough south and at just enough lower an elevation than we are, were able to catch glimpses of magenta in the northern sky in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Here at our elevation, though, there were still too many clouds, mountains too near and their mass taking up too much of the visible portion of the sky, for us to see the Northern Lights.
Which is not to say that their appearance here is unprecedented. As a child, Wings witnessed them on more than one occasion, a rare but still recurrent manifestation here generations ago. There is a stubborn myth that these lands are too far south for such celestial events to be seen, but “rare” is not “impossible,” and part of the problem in recent generations is the ever-expanding radius of light pollution.
Even so, most dark hours here manifest in a remarkable clarity, and even on the most ordinary night, the stars grant us an extraordinary display. Here, we are able to see past the obvious constellations into the silver cloud of the spiral galaxy to which our planet belongs; able, too, to enjoy a front-row seat to the dance of comet and meteorite. In the weeks to come, if we can find it, we shall be able to bear witness to the birth of a star.
And these are celestial manifestations that have always occurred here, events to which the ancestors of the people who belong to this place have always borne witness and used to reckon their universe.
The image above that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation represents Wings’s capturing, on film, of one such event: just shy of thirty years ago, the so-called Hale-Bopp comet that made its way across the western sky for months. In 1995, the drought that has now turned into something altogether more serious was just taking hold of these lands, and at the time, people expected it to be both temporary and remediable. The phrase “climate change” was just beginning to enter the lexicon — global warming at that juncture being the common and the much-scorned turn of phrase — and the only people who visibly treated the comet’s arrival as a harbinger of potential horror were those in the cult known as Heaven’s Gate.
On this land mass, our own peoples vary widely in their interpretations of celestial phenomena. Some are indeed omens intended to serve as warnings; others of the potential for prosperity. From comets to meteor showers to eclipses to the Northern Lights, Indigenous peoples all have their own interpretations of what such events mean [or do not mean, as the case may be], but I suspect that we are all mostly agreed that they are, in their specific and variable ways, manifestations of power. These are the paths of cosmic spirits, and as our ancestors knew well, they have much to teach us about our world, our universe, and our own place in both.
Overdevelopment, light pollution, the capitalist and colonial way of life all conspire to deprive us of sight of the night skies now. With it, we have lost a sense of our place in the world, such that it no longer inspires awe and joy, or the comfort to be found in a sense of home; instead, what little people can now perceive instills only fear. We know well the extent to which the world as a whole has lost its way, and we are determined to preserve one of the few places where it’s possible to find it once again.
This is a land that permits us, in a sense, to traverse the paths of cosmic spirits, and we by doing so, we find ourselves once more.
~ Aji
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