Finding beauty in the dark night of grief…
Thursday evening, New England was treated to a rare view of the Aurora Borealis. Alert calls and texts went out from Maine to New York to make sure family and friends didn’t miss this spectacular celestial show. I am grateful to a friend who notified me, because seeing the magnificently colored night sky has long been on my bucket list. The next day Facebook was flooded with photos and tales of people who had chased the Aurora Borealis for years, that simply walked out their front door and witnessed the grandeur. Finally able to check this off my bucket list, I am still pondering its rich messages.
The simple explanation for this spectacle is that it occurs when charged particles from the sun collide with Earth’s atmosphere: But the deeper lessons are perhaps more relevant than the science. Like with much of nature, there are distinctive messages in this rare occurrence priming me to consider the similarities between the grief journey and this striking Aurora sighting. If the Aurora Borealis is a lesson for a griever’s heart it instructs us to embrace the darkness even when the light isn’t shining brightly, to examine the highs and lows of grief, and to put on the lens of our heart to see loss more clearly.
Feeling lost when one grieves is like gazing into the black night sky and can be unnerving. Surely there are nights when the stars and moon brighten the darkness and create an exceptional beauty, but there are also many wearisome nights in which the sky appears as a vast dark emptiness. Ask any bereaved person, grief can often feel this way. And yet, as with any spontaneous light, enlightenment is to be found within the darkest grief. A painful loss often reveals the depth of love we have for someone. In the dark night of loss the brilliant light of compassion and the goodness of people is exposed and the preciousness of life shines sharply when we encounter its loss.
The blackness of the sky is still apparent during the Aurora, but the blackness is tinted with pink, red, greens and blues. “The different colors of the aurora are caused by the type of gas molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere (primarily oxygen and nitrogen) that are excited by charged particles from the sun, with the specific color depending on which gas is interacting and at what altitude within the atmosphere the interaction occurs; essentially, different gases emit different colors when energized by the solar particles.” (mg.co.uk/stories/topics/what-causes-northern-lights-aurora-borealis-explained#:) Grief too has its varied, often beautiful hues. A more inquisitive posture with grief can open us to the shadows. Like Aurora’s force caused by a charged particle, grief’s intensity fluctuates, sparking new thoughts, challenges, and memories.
It’s most interesting that Aurora’s visibility is less beautiful until you cast your camera on it. What a powerful lesson to apply to grief. Our willingness to picture our grief, to see it and capture its essence will bring it into sharper view, often depicting something more beautiful than we expect. “A camera can show the Aurora Borealis better than the naked eye because it can collect light over a longer period of time using long exposure settings, allowing it to capture fainter colors and details that the human eye struggles to see in low-light conditions, especially when it comes to the subtle variations in color within the aurora; essentially, our eyes aren’t as sensitive to low-light color variations as a camera sensor is.” (https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2024-05-13/why-did-the-aurora-borealis-look-better-through-a-camera)
If you were lucky enough to witness this probably, once in a lifetime occurrence, I hope you enjoyed the magic of it. If not, keep searching for the mystical power of light and enlightenment in the skies, in your life and in your grief.
