High Lights: Our lives are governed by wondrous phenomena that we don’t often stop to consider. (Melissa Kirsch, April 25, 2026, NY Times)
Knowing that the spectacle of the northern lights occurs because of electromagnetism doesn’t help to explain the feeling I had that night in the cornfield, the deep gratitude I felt for days afterward. I kept thinking about how we’d gone from total darkness to pyrotechnics in an instant. I had this feeling that there was magic in the world around me, that beauty could emerge from nothingness and I didn’t have to do anything to summon it.