Originally hailing from Queensland, Australia, I had only ever dreamed of seeing the Northern Lights. When I made it to the Northern Hemisphere, I believed I would need to travel to the North Pole - or at least to the very tip of Finland - to be treated to such a wonder.
Therefore, imagine my surprise when I received a text from a friend who lived an hour away from me on the other side of Sligo, in Ireland, telling me to look outside at the sky.
Well, I looked outside, through the window, but couldn't see anything. I decided I shouldn't be so lazy so I actually got up from my computer and went outside.
It was a lovely, warm May night in Co Mayo near the Roscommon border. I had always associated the Northern Lights with frosty night air so I was pleasantly surprised to see the phenomenon on such a warm evening. Well, night - it was around midnight.
At first, it looked like a milky cloud had descended, but after detecting slight colour variations and dancing movement, I realised I was not seeing any normal cloud.
I used the night vision mode through my phone camera. This revealed the colours that were not visible to the naked eye. It took further tweaking to show the vibrant colours I was finally about to capture.
There is nothing mysterious or miraculous about the Northern Lights. They are simply charged particles from the sun hitting gases in the Earth's atmosphere and occur around the North Pole when the solar wind carrying the particles interacts with the Earth's magnetic field. (There is a similar phenomenon in the Southern Hemisphere.) And yet they are fascinating, inspiring amazement and awe across generations of humans since about 2600 BC when the first sighting was recorded - and most likely for many generations before then.
So why the fascination? Even with the scientific explanation, it still seems like a miracle to me. And a poignant lesson. We don't always see what's right in front of our faces and sometimes we need a lens to focus on the amazing things around us.
This is what has given me pause for contemplation.
Sometimes our lives are filled with the mundane. We lose the joi de vivre we may have once had. There are no rose-tinted glasses to look through and life feels downright dull, or worse, meaningless.
The Lights taught me that sometimes we need to look at things through a different lens. I'm not advocating rose-tinted glasses to distort our view of the world. Rather I would suggest figurative corrective glasses, such as those worn to help the wearer see further, or perhaps to be able to read the fine print.
Just like the camera lens clarified the picture, filtered out the fluff and left behind a stunning display of dancing colour, if we look through the clutter of our lives intending to find something precious, that is exactly what we will find.
I had two choices when my friend contacted me. I could have ignored her text and gone to bed, perhaps gave a perfunctory glance out of the window and saw nothing of consequence. Or, I could have investigated her claim. Lucky for me, I investigated and am richer for the experience.
Look to the light, find pleasure in small things, and discover miracles. You'll find them, too.
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