Some Shining Coil of Wind

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.

And thinking: maybe something will come, some shining coil of wind…

– Mary Oliver, lines from Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does it End?

“Is that…?” 

Alex’s eyes jumped back and forth between the ribbon of road and the ribbon of sky above us. It was after ten o’clock and the last of the day’s light was still fading from the western edge of a clear sky.

But a haze had crept in, a subtle opacity laid overtop the otherwise clear, increasingly starry expanse. Our view was limited to a south-north band that followed the highway, hemmed in by fir trees, but as we watched, what at first seemed like light cloud cover began to organize itself into bands, as if someone had draped an impossibly sheer cloth over the dome of the sky.

I rolled down my window and leaned my head out to look straight up.

“Oh my god, Alex. That’s it.”

We were on the final twenty minute leg of the two-ish hour drive from our home on Bainbridge Island to where his parents live on Totten Inlet, west of Washington’s capital city of Olympia. We called them excitedly and chose our meeting spot.

We passed the turnoff to their house and continued to the end of the road. We parked just ahead of the two lane bridge that fed the tiny island at the opening of Totten Inlet. A group of people – including a cadre of teenagers in formal attire – were already gathered on the bridge, gawking at the spectacle stretching out overhead. 

A knot of color – pale green, blue, purple – formed above our heads. The colors swirled, and the rays emanating from the knot fell around us in streamers. A coronal aurora, I have since learned, formed when parallel streams of charged particles being funneled to the earth’s magnetic poles converged. A celestial confluence, the merging of cosmic rivers. 

The conditions, we’d heard that morning, were ideal for spotting the aurora borealis, the northern lights. If the sky remained clear they would be visible, even at this southerly latitude, such was the magnitude of the solar storm creating the event. We’d had our eyes fixed on the sky our whole drive, wishing the day away to see what the darkness would reveal.

We huddled on the bridge – Alex, his parents Barb and Fritz, our dog Maple – turning in circles, heads thrown back at impossible angles. We bandied “wows” and “whoas” between us in a verbal game of hot potato. We felt impossibly lucky.

A gangly teen in dapper attire topped with a mop of unruly hair wheeled on his friends, and, grabbing one of them by the shoulders, exclaimed, “It’s green! It’s blue! It’s purple! It’s red! Oh my god, it’s a friggin’ rainbow in the sky! Oh my god! Oh my god!” 

I laughed out loud, I couldn’t help myself. I don’t know what compelled him to put words to the moment, but they felt so hilariously inadequate next to the phenomenon, despite their accuracy. But what else was there to say?

The display stretched out before us, climbing on pillars of light that morphed from green to fushia. It lit up every horizon we could see, from the west through the north to the east and overhead. 

A photographer, equipped with a respectable looking lens and a tripod, asked us if we wanted to see his images. I pretended at politeness without dropping my gaze from the sky overhead. “It’s really not fair that this is our impression of the aurora,” he said, matter-of-factly, as he advanced through his own images of moments just passed, too quickly for anyone watching to actually see. “This is why people are disappointed when they see the northern lights. The cameras make it look like more than it is.”

Our iPhone cameras did the same for us, capturing three seconds worth of light instead of using the light available in real time, as our eyes do. Still, it hadn’t occurred to me to be disappointed. People are disappointed when they see the northern lights? I frowned at the thought in the darkness and moved away. 

All I felt was awe as I stood on the bridge, and walked its length with my family, and stood again. We were there for over an hour, maybe close to two. We then took up watch from my in-laws’ home until the sky resumed its normal midnight hue. We finally tucked ourselves into bed in the wee hours.

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Aurora borealis occur when storms on the surface of the sun send waves of energized particles hurtling toward earth on solar winds at speeds of, in the case of this recent event, three million miles per hour. These energized particles slam into the earth’s magnetic field, which shunts them toward the magnetic poles where their collision with atmospheric gasses releases energy in the form of photons, light. 

May’s solar storm produced multiple X class flares – the strongest of the rating system – and “coronal mass ejections” whose emissions resulted in one of the strongest geomagnetic storms on scientific record in decades. Some are conjecturing this storm was of a magnitude – both in terms of its strength and far-reaching visibility – that hasn’t been seen in five hundred years. 

Where does earth begin? Where does it end? While to an extent I’ve consciously known otherwise, my brain habitually reduces the earth to its crust – the bit to which I’m gravitationally bound, the bit that I can see. Maybe the heavenward orientation of my childhood left me with a crick in my neck, because my attention, my prayers, have since been earthbound. But the aurora made visible to me earth’s outer reaches, its magnetic field, as far as 250 miles beyond the crust where I stood. I can no longer point down to earth, up to not-earth.

The more like this I learn, the more the awe that I felt the night of May 10th grows. “Awe is really about vast things that transcend your understanding of the world which you need to accommodate to your understanding of reality,” says researcher and author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life Dacher Keltner in an interview with Behavioral Scientist. I’ve had some reconceptualizing work to do as a result of this experience and my subsequent learning – my brain demanded it. 

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Where do I begin? Where do I end? In coincidence’s beautiful way, awe has a similar effect on notions of self that the aurora had on my notions of earth. Keltner notes, “New studies of the default mode network, which is where self-representation takes place, show that awe reduces activation in those chunks of the cortex…It’s really that the self is quiet.” 

There were maybe a hundred people milling around Steamboat Island bridge under the May 10th aurora and it felt – for the reverential hush, for the sense of an audience with the divine – like being in church. In such quiet is connection: “You start to realize, I’m not a separate person, I’m connected to all these people,” continues Keltner. “If you’re looking for change, [awe is] a good emotion to seek.” 

Here, in the convergence of auroral epiphanies, I’m left holding a question in Mary Oliver’s singular words: “Where does the temple begin? Where does it end?” I feel newly atune to the impossible magic of the earth, with its molten core and magnetic aura that defend us from solar onslaught. Of the interaction of earth with the sun’s violent outbursts, where they meet in the stratified thresholds of the ionosphere, casting off greens and reds and blues and purples in the swan songs of their collisions: shining coils of wind. Of the ribbons and coronas that formed over our heads on May 10th, making visible the velocity of the solar debris and earth’s movement through space. 

Here, in the afterglow of awe, I feel changed. I feel an expanded sense of my place in physical terms, one that extends beyond geography right up to the edges of space. I feel newly akin to anyone who could stand in the sublime of the aurora, as though with arms open, silently or shouting, “Oh my god! Oh my god!”