Who could ever forget the beauty of the aurora borealis in all its simplicity after seeing it only once. How it shimmers in the sky overhead. If you’re preoccupied and aren’t looking to the heavens you’d miss this natural display of celestial fireworks. As it said in the Reader’s Digest edition, Why In The World: All You Ever Wanted To Know About The World Around You But May Never Have Thought To Ask, the aurora is, “…linked with the sun’s magnetic storms. Charged particles in the solar wind interact with gases in our atmosphere, producing an ever-changing array of white and multicolored lights.”
With a telescope, we can look up and see the remains of the most spectacular fireworks of all–the remnants of a supernova explosion. And then there was the display at my home on Canada Day two years ago…
It was long after dark. There was another display at that community park close by. We could hear the noise of the exploding rockets and see brief flashes of light. All the while, a single firefly floated from one of our flower beds, across our lawn and into the huge blue spruce that adorns our neighbor’s property, its soft light blinking on and off, on and off… My wife and children were mesmerized by its appearance, and how bold it seemed to be as it once flew up our walk where we were gathered to watch its silent display of beauty. I was more impressed by its delicate show than the fireworks off in the distance…
After the community display was over, a thunderstorm appeared in the distance. Its lightning streaked the sky at one point like a spider’s web. The crash of thunder was deafening at times as the rain poured down. The little creature we had been watching sought shelter in the boughs of this huge tree, its brief flickers like a solitary Christmas bulb left fizzling high in the branches. I know what display I’ll always remember on that Canada Day; the one that was so quiet…
Fireworks lighting up a nighttime sky, exploding high overhead in a rainbow of colors. A thunderstorm rages, its noise violent and deafening, the night ripped apart with jagged streaks of lightning, trees bending in the fierce winds, the smell of ozone after it moved on.
On a night when there is a storm on the sun, we see the shimmering colors of the aurora borealis.
On a warm summer’s night, we gaze up at the stars and think of the nuclear fires that produce a light so bright that we can see it blazing light years away. Farther out, the remnants of a supernova exploding that can rip a star more massive than our own sun to pieces. And still farther out, the remnants of the biggest firecracker of them all, the big bang that produced the universe in the first place.
We tear ourselves away from such thoughts to see a single, beautiful firefly silently lighting up the air just above the grass, and another’s twinkling light in the boughs of a blue spruce.
Marianne Moore in the poem Silence, written in 1935, said: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / Not in silence, but restraint.”
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Don Jackson
