Auroras Borealis

Wow, what an important lesson I learned last night...

Yesterday was a very busy day for both my wife and I.  We had extremely long and demanding days at work, and then had a tonne of running around at home with kids and dinner and activities.  After all of that, I even had to pull out my lap top and put in another couple of hours of work.

As I was shutting things down and getting ready for bed, I remembered a chore that someone else had forgotten to do.  Grumbling, I stomped outside to get it done, when something caught my ear:  packs of coyotes were singing in chorus on the hillside above our house.  The noise made me pause--wiping away my  grouchiness--and provided me with a deep calm.  In that calm I turned and looked down the mountainside and my eyes focused, slowly, on strange shimmer in the northern sky.  The Northern Lights!  They were beautiful and bright, and so spectacular that I had to run into the house, pull my wife out of bed and away her book, and drag her outside.  The two of us stood silently in our front yard gazing at this amazing phenomena.  It was especially meaningful because we had shared a conversation this weekend about her feeling like she always missed the Northern Lights, whereas me, an avid outdoorsman, have seen them with some regularity on my fall hunting trips.  And now here, on our doorstep, were those beautiful colours dancing across the sky to a haunting chorus of coyote calls.  It was magical--a "time-stopped" experience.

It was really a special moment for us.  It reminded us how wondrous the world is and, more importantly, how we can miss so much of it--so easily--by not paying attention.  It is so easy to have a bad day, to slump around feeling sorry for ourselves forget the world around us.  It is so easy to have tunnel vision and get stuck on what ails us.  Yet, the moment of our summer came to us last night because we stopped.  That's it, we just had to stop.

It was there all along, and we just had to look up to see it.