Aurora Borealis

I-69 takes me from my home in central Michigan to the place I was born, Angola, Indiana. My Dad helped build part of that highway when he was a young man and I was about three feet tall. He is now retired and I am now dreaming of retiring.

Back in the early 1990's, I was traveling north on I-69 after a wonderful visit with my Grandparents. It was dark and the sky was peppered with stars. Off in the west I could see the beam of a spotlight, the kind that a business might use to attract customers, shining straight up into the night. I kept driving.

Then I started thinking.

Off in the west was nothing. No towns, no cities. No stores that would shine a spotlight up into the sky. I kept my eyes on that light, curious.

The Creator blessed me that night, for it was precisely in a random moment that I was watching the light when an arc formed around it and out poured the deepest crimson I have ever seen, as if someone had a giant pitcher of liquid color and was emptying it across the sky.  Soon greens and blues appeared, swirling across the black sky. I blinked hard, rubbed my eyes, for a moment unable to comprehend what I was seeing. Then it hit me.

It was the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights.

I pulled to the side of the road and turned off my car. As I watched the colors dancing across the heavens, I started to cry. I had never seen anything so beautiful and it literally took my breath away, moving me to tears at its magnificence.

Grandma! I had to call Grandma!

I started up my truck and raced to the rest area, which was only a few miles up the road. Thank heavens I had lots of quarters for the payphone. I began dialing. Grandma answered.

"Grandma, Grandma, the Northern Lights are out! Go outside quick and look up between your trees. I know you can see them! Hurry!" I exclaimed, barely able to contain myself.  I then put in quarter after quarter, calling every person I knew to tell them to go out and look up into the sky.

Everyone at the rest area was standing outside, silent, watching the beautiful reds and greens and whites and blues swirling and pirouetting across the midwestern sky. It was Sacred. There was reverence.


What a glorious place we live in, what amazing and awesome gifts we are given in the form of beauty on this Earth. It is beauty that must be shared when we experience it. An instinctual response put there to keep us all connected to such things that steal our breath. I hope you see something beautiful today, something that steals your breath and makes you run to the phone to call everyone you know. And I hope they all answer.

The Devaluing of Wisdom

Once upon a time this land was covered with large Trees...giant white pines, red and white oaks, sugar maples, and hemlocks. Trees that size have wisdom. They have witnessed decades, sometimes centuries, of life. Those giant old Trees along your street that are 150 years old? They have seen a time when your neighborhood was a beautiful, peaceful forest. They were around when humans traded their horses in for the Model T. They lived through the Civil War, the Apache War, the Snake War, both World Wars, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to name a few. They have lived through 29 Presidents, starting with Abraham Lincoln. When these Trees were born, there were a little more than 1 billion people on the planet. Now there are over 9 billion.

All that wisdom held within the big old Tree in your front yard.

Wisdom takes time. It is slow growing. It is cumulative. Its only requirement is time.

Our throw away society no longer values wisdom. Time is too expensive. The worker who has been on the job for 35 years commands a larger wage than an inexperienced 20 year old. So the company gets rid of the older worker and replaces him or her with a sapling.  The sapling will grow and eventually be harvested, too. Just like our forests. Never given a chance to mature and grow to reach their fullest potential.

All that wisdom, gone.

There is also something else lost in this process. We lose our roots, our sense of belonging. I would argue that consistency brings security to our lives and Spirits. Ever wonder why old folks long for days gone by? Because all the rapid changes that occur in our world everyday are destabilizing. Much of our daily experience is driven by the greed of capitalism - the race to keep up with ever changing products and technology, geared more toward sales and profit margins than actual necessity. Do we really need a new and better iPhone every year? Or a new Windows operating system on our computer? Or three new sizes of iPads? So much energy spent learning how to operate this or that. Rotary phones were so simple, you put your finger in the dial and turned. The rest of your time was YOUR TIME.

I like to call it "imagined deprivation".

I see children of friends and co-workers doing this and that after school, being shuttled to this game or that lesson. It tires me out and I am not the one driving them!  But what are they really doing? Packing in so many different activities, rarely sticking with any one where they might actually develop a skill or talent...the beginning of wisdom. What, if any, of these activities will they take hold of and carry through their lives?

Folks used to stay in the same jobs for decades. They lived in the same houses for their lifetime. They kept their friends and family close. They held the wisdom of their town or Tribe, they knew the place they lived in and all their neighbors. They were the storytellers and historians. We used to live like Trees.

Some might say, so what? Here's what. I am looking around and I don't see this way of being making the world a better place. There are more children going hungry. We are becoming more detached from each other, more distracted by technology. Wages are lower as corporations strive to increase profits in a global economy. Mother Earth is hurting and we are destroying the environment, our true home. I would bet the Trees would tell us we are heading down a path of self destruction. They would know. They have seen it all.

If we fail to allow ourselves to develop wisdom, it we continue to devalue this great gift that we have been given, our world will begin to resemble a high school with no teachers to guide us. I don't know about you, but I would prefer not to go back to those days.

Maybe the first step we can take is to go have a talk with our old Trees.