Look up
On May 10, I leave my house in northern Washington state just after dawn. I drive alone along a braided river, over sagebrush plateaus, and through fields of golden flowers. Then one plane across the Cascades, and another across the Rockies, to finally land in my my childhood home in Colorado. I’ve come to stand alongside my dad as we observe the passing of his sister, my aunt. My oldest sister has come from Wisconsin; another cousin, from New York. There are cousins and an uncle and aunt in Denver; my mom and my brother and sister-in-law and nephew and niece in Boulder. Still others will gather on Zoom, to watch the service from a distance, because they can’t make the trip.
The night I arrive, I curl up in bed in the guest room at my parents’ house and scroll through news on my phone. I learn that a powerful solar storm is hurling great arcs of ions towards Earth, where they will cascade through the atmosphere in a light show that may be visible as far south as Florida and Alabama. The aurora borealis. It’s late, and I’m exhausted, but I pad into the living room to stand on the back of the couch and peer north through the high windows under the ceiling eave. Clouds and city lights blur the horizon, so I return to bed.
Should I? I wonder. I stare at the phone, then begin punching in every name I can think of back in the valley where I live. By the time I’m done, I have 28. I write a quick note, telling everyone to watch the sky. Maybe, being so much farther north, they will see what I can’t. Maybe they will pass the message on to others I didn’t think of, kicking off a sort of celestial phone tree that says simply, Look up. I pause again, fretting about how overwhelming a group text can be once replies start rolling in, and likes of replies, and replies to liked replies. Then, I hit send.
Notifications start buzzing immediately, and I worry that maybe I’ve already annoyed everyone. But messages and pictures keep coming. At first, there are faint white bands of light. Then, they glow weakly green, dancing alongside a bright moon. One friend laments that the aurora looks better and clearer in the photos than in the sky—the camera picking up things that human eyes cannot. I laugh and turn off the phone and go to sleep.
When I wake the next day, there are 30 new texts. This group of people, many of whom don’t know one another’s phone numbers and so aren’t sure who they’re talking to, have been telling each other where to look, and reporting back on what they’re seeing in the skies over their respective locations —Carlton, Twisp, Winthrop, Bear Creek, Davis Lake, Glacier, even Kelowna. I scroll down to find them exclaiming, “holy guacamole” and “this is wild.” Then the thread is mostly photos, as if words have fallen short. The greens grow deeper, then blend with pinks and reds, the images showing a many-vantaged view of what I can only describe as a full-on Ghostbusters sky—a shimmering rosette flanked by beams of color, billowing high above houses, trees, mountains.
I scroll through a second time, then a third, feeling as elated as if I had seen the aurora myself, from all of these places at once. I get up and show my mom and my dad.
Across the world, people watched, for a few moments or a few hours. They reached out to others, who told others. And somehow, our combined attention made this momentous sight—the bright touch of our sun—even bigger. It magnified in the telling, in the shared experience, a collective awe reaching through and beyond all of us. We were small together, and part of a giant universe, together.
It occurs to me later as I watch my dad give my aunt’s eulogy that this is one reason why people gather. Watching the moon eclipse the sun, or the Earth’s shadow eclipse the moon. Watching two people join their lives and their communities at a wedding. Mourning the loss of someone we love, and celebrating what they made, and who they were, and who they were to us. That they live on through the stories we tell about them, and the new things we learn about their lives from one another. That we were small together, that we were part of a giant universe, together.
This post originally appeared in May 2024 and was re-posted in response to active aurora borealis across the northern US in early October.