Chasmata

“The phantom-host has faded quite,

splendor and terror gone.

Portent or proise—and gives way

to pale, meek Dawn;

The coming, going,

alike in wonder showing—

Alike the God,

decreeing and commanding

the million blades that glowed.

The muster and disbanding—

Midnight and Morn.”

-from Herman Melville’s “Aurora Borealis”

Goddess of the Dawn, harbinger of the North Wind, the Aurora Borealis appears across the northern sky like what can only be described as a miracle. Serpentine and often towering, it is reminiscent of sound waves, but is silent. So silent that last night my husband set an alarm for the top of every hour so that he could step outside to look up, and north.

What looks like a miracle is actually a violence; the sun commanding its charged soldiers into the Earth’s upper atmosphere at 45 million miles per hour. A day and a half’s journey, sometimes three. This violence of magnetism often interferes with satellite communication. When the charged soldiers arrive, the elemental air ionizes into calm green and excited crimson that human eyes can detect and camera eyes can refine with their slow-shuttered blink. The farther south the lights travel, the more crimson they become. They often appear to be dancing.

My sleep last night was punctuated with waking up to find the other side of the bed empty. My husband promised to let me know if the aurora had arrived. I fell back to sleep countless times until I awoke in the dark to get ready for work. As usual, we wished wellness to one another before I slipped out of our warm bed. The sky is too overcast, he said. I love you. Drive safe. He always does this in a twilight of pursed lips and sleep breath and quickly falls back to sleep.

Today would be a different day. I knew this for certain. Instead of heading north for work, I’d be heading south, and then east, towards a town where some residents have recently had the worst days of their lives. It is what I do, meeting with people on what is possibly the worst day or moment of their lives.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca also marveled at the Aurora Borealis. Like many thinking minds, he desired explanation. In his texts about the aurora, he had written “…there are chasmata, when some particular area of the sky sinks back and sends out flames, as though tearing open something that had been buried.” He went on to describe the chasmata, recalling the colors as if they were indicators of swinging moods: “The colors of all these things are also quite numerous: some have an incredibly dazzling redness, some a frail and weak flame, some a resplendent white glow, some are flickering, some have a uniformly deep gold color without beams or rays.” Although the aurora is neither flames nor is the sky revealing something buried or cryptic, it is a gorgeous interpretation.

I set off on my hour-long drive south, and then east, to the tragedy-stricken town. Two child suicides in five weeks. Both children attended the same school. My commute to work is usually in the dark and about an hour earlier. But today it was different. I was leaving later, and instead of scanning the darkness of the roadside for kamikaze deer, I was dazzled by brief glimpses of light in the sky as I drove parallel to one of Pennsylvania’s Appalachian ridges. Where one ridge ended and another began, swirls of orange and hot pink beckoned my eye as the sun, again, for the umpteenth day, rose into its continuous, reliable narrative. Eventually, the eastern sky was saturated in hues so beautiful that I held back tears. Small murmurations of Starlings swirled like misty clouds along the bright skyscape. A trickle of piano came from the radio as if the radio knew.

I was sad, though, knowing that my husband—bereft of his aurora experience—was missing this miraculous event. Surely he was still asleep, his alarm no longer poised to wake him. I, who slept throughout the night, was gifted these lights instead. I was also sad for the deceased students, the pairs of parents having to bury their child. The siblings. The friends. The last, lonely moments that had to have been accompanied by a darkness no light could penetrate, however far it traveled. That devastating, final choice that was made: the unbeing of themselves. And here I was, in a comfortable sweater, in a comfortable life, gorgeous light from the sky winking at me. Here I was in my ability to feel that the light was enough.

As the marvel of light subsided with the eventual rising of the sun, I couldn’t help my mind from comparing the beauty of the aurora to the beauty of a sunrise. If it’s a matter of color and texture, both are quite lovely. In fact, a sunrise can be more gorgeous than a barely noticeable gloaming of green or red light. But of course, it’s not a matter of just color and texture. It’s circumstantial. A rare event. An average person won’t witness an aurora 28,470 times in their lifetime. If you take sunsets into the equation also, that number is 56,940. The average person sees a sunrise or sunset. The not-so-average person (myself included) experiences a sunrise or sunset. An aurora, however, is an experience regardless of human averageness.

Philosopher William James thought deeply about these stances; he labeled them voluntary (using effort to pay attention or have an experience) and passive (effortlessly giving attention and aligning with all the emotions of an experience). As a passive human, I can experience joy in an apple seed or in discovering that the tickle near my ear is a rogue caterpillar. As a passive human, the sky sinking back into a chasmata of flames and unearthing threats is simply violent arrays of auroral light. As a passive human, I can calmly talk with people who have elaborate plans to violently end their lives or the lives of others.

I met up with my colleague in the school’s parking lot and together we walked into the grief-stricken building with its backdrop of mist-covered mountains. Before heading in, I had sent pictures of the sunrise to my husband. My colleague and I sat in a small conference room, preparing ourselves for the onslaught of distraught students who needed a listening ear. Eventually, due to the abundance of upset students, my colleague and I were separated so to allow a continuous, but more private engagement for the back-to-back students. Some students came in pairs of friends. Some came in cynical, bullied, or traumatized by their own personal experiences. Some were relatives of the deceased students. Some came in with concerns for other students. One came in crying help me, I don’t want to be alive anymore. Help me. One by one by two by one they continuously came, these young, charged particles full of sound, and light, that I tried to help them see.

For a quick few minutes, my colleague and I came up for air, checking in on one another. A shelf in the conference room had a box of placement ribbons. I stole two “1st Place” ribbons and handed one to her. Naturally, an emotional exhaustion occurs in such circumstances. I always describe it as a buzzing; my brain popping as if carbonated. Sometimes the carbonation reaches my skin. If I flip a switch in my mind, the carbonation is pleasurable. Sometimes a good cry is had in my car. Always, I call my husband and like a net, he captures all my falling light. My colleague was okay. And so was I.

On the hour-long drive home, I saw a light I did not want to see on my dashboard. My tires needed air. At the air pump, I sighed at my wheels but gave them what they needed and continued home in the near-darkness ablaze with artificial lights. My husband had illuminated the Christmas lights he hung on our garage. I sat in the driveway for a minute, staring at the large bulbs in the quietude of the car. The evening was desirably cool and misty. Heading into the house, I was greeted by happy dogs who only see hues of dull blues and yellows, which is enough for them. My husband came home soon after. I had picked up an odd overnight shift that would begin in nine hours. We ate homemade chili and watched Chernobyl. I cried at the devastation of Chernobyl before heading to bed to sleep for four hours. I closed my eyes in the early evening to allow the chasmata of dreams to take me, knowing that at that precise moment, a pair of young parents were likely standing in their formalwear, hands clasped, at their child’s casket.