"The Northern Lights I Did Not See" (the cosmic light I did)

I didn't either, nor did I bother to point my phone at them. It's the sort of experience that needs to be unmediated. But that un-diminishing sense of smallness, the sense of scale that elevates the mind and heart can be got at second-hand. It's the cosmic perspective.

"…I felt small, which I expected to feel, and untroubled by my smallness, which I did not. Standing beneath the open sky, pondering an event that was happening so far away as to be incomprehensible, reminded me again of my own infinitesimal role within a system whose magnificence even the most brilliant of my kind can understand in only the meagerest measure — if only briefly, such moments have a way of making my earthly worries seem more manageable…" —Margaret Renkl