Well, duh, it looks much better in the movies done by digital effect. 
/ :-\
Taking into consideration the topic of this thread. Northern Lights are something that you have to stop, be still, and pay attention to, in order to really see all that’s happening. A quick glance up and seeing the brightness isn’t much until you watch for a while and see all the movement and change.
I’ve seen some pretty amazing northern lights that would rival what they do in the movies. Just the fact that it’s not in the movies makes it a whole lot better.
In my experience, the northern lights indeed sometimes DO rival the ones seen on postcards and popculture. More green and less funky disco colors. Also my most beautiful memory of foxfire was when just glancing up. It was HUUGE and circular and so much more intense then any picture i’d seen before or after.
I saw red northern lights once. Only once though.
Green is the usual color here, I think the other colors become more common as you go north.
Sometimes you’ll look at the sky for a while, then suddenly realize there’s something there, like a veil of light so thin your not sure if your seeing it or not.
I had a similar experience at a rainbow gathering in Ashcroft B.C several years ago.I think I may have been the only person to see the blue green light show until people started asking what i was looking at.A week later I saw way more people gazing at the sky,guess the word got around.
[quote=“heyvictor, post:12, topic:861”]Taking into consideration the topic of this thread. Northern Lights are something that you have to stop, be still, and pay attention to, in order to really see all that’s happening. A quick glance up and seeing the brightness isn’t much until you watch for a while and see all the movement and change.
I’ve seen some pretty amazing northern lights that would rival what they do in the movies. Just the fact that it’s not in the movies makes it a whole lot better.[/quote]
(It was sarcasm!)
BlueHeron-
I understood it was sarcasm. No offence or challenge meant there. Some people do really think and say things like that.
It’s amazing how often things go unnoticed by the majority of the people.
One time I was at a bus stop in the city I grew up in along the Mississippi River. I saw a couple of eagles circling over head and I pointed them out to the person next to me.
Without even looking up they said, “Those aren’t eagles.”
I said, “Yeah they are. Look they have white heads and white tails.”
Again without looking up they said, “We don’t have eagles here.”
So I just watched them by myself.
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OK, I wasn’t sure. Depending on my mood I can completely miss sarcasm sometimes so I didn’t want to assume…
Your story about the eagles reminds me of something that I notice pretty regularly that nobody else seems to give a second thought to. All the trees, flowers, bushes, etc. in the city are lined up in rows, and pruned/mowed or otherwise manicured and controlled. Those plants are only there because somebody put them there. The only autonomous plants are the dandelions. People in the city do not recognize this as autonomy; for them the dandelion’s autonomy is worse than useless: a “bad” quality instead of being a natural quality that should be easy enough to accept…
Yeah, the one time I really remember seeing northern lights, they were really hard to see sometimes, but really cool when you saw them.
You know this is THE FIRST TIME I have felt closer to the “western” world, in terms of my personal experiances with things. When people usually talk about “wow it feels so great to go barefoot” etc, i don’t know that, since as far back as i can remember less things on me = better. So i went around barefoot a lot.
anyways, i do enjoy silence, (being someone who was brought up in a place like rishivalley) but since i moved to the western world, i find my attention span decreasing. With all the entertianment that is avialable all the time etc. Back in india we used to have weekly power cuts, where we all just sit outside and listen to the night, maybe chat a little bit. Fortunately, I still have not lost touch with feral-Tj.
Senses wise i find, at least for myself, that a most of my senses are very sharp when they need to be (YEARS of “i am sitting in front of the TV and my parents can be home any minute, if they see me hear i am dead” will do this to you). Kinda like the reflexes a prey has to escape predator, i hear or feel something i RUN first before realising what went on. So i do have that side of me as well. i DO listen to music, but i am mostly aware of whats going on, or at least as much as I would be even otherwise. I think tho on some level i tone down the sensory inputs, cuz regularly ud think im utterly deaf and blind as a bat, by the way i do things. But then there are those times when i seem to have the sensory attention of a deer. I also find that i can smell a LOT more if i need to, but i don’t do it normally cuz it would overwhelm me. Since smell is a strong sense for me, and i am from a place thats not that great smelling (Urban cities in India), i think it was a sort of a defense mechanism that developed in me).
Like if i wanna wake up in the morning the breese rustiling the leaves outside will wake me at the right moment, but if i decide to sleep, i can sleep through a thunderstorm, and an earthquake. I HAVE actually been thru a 6.4 on the richter without noticing anything.
But generally i DO find modern culture does not have people stop and smell the roses so to speak. Or actually LISTEN and sense what is around you, BE AWARE. I think a lot of peoples problems and stresses would go away if they just relax take a deep breath and listen to the wind, feel the ground beneath ur feet, sense the creatures around you, and smell the trees etc. [anyone else notice trees in general have a distinct smell at night, i.e. when they stop photosynthesizing?].
-Tj
anyone else notice trees in general have a distinct smell at night, i.e. when they stop photosynthesizing?
The night breeze here smells amazing. Pine/spruce/lilac mostly, but as you said, these, while still recognizable, smell different at night.
Today an aunt of mine was looking around and asked if it was going to rain. I replied, surprised, “Um, no. It doesn’t even smell like it.”
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I always smell for the rain too. Seeing clouds may or may not bring rain, but if you can smell it, it’s there, and it’s coming your way ;D
Can anyone else smell static? Like when there’s gonna be lightning?
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You can definitely feel the air being sticky and heavy during lightning. Some people with arthritis say they can feel it in their joints even before a thunderstorm has arrived, so I don’t see why other people couldn’t sense it through practice?
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I can smell it though, not just “sense”. I can tell an incoming ‘normal’ rainstorm from a lightning storm by smell alone.
If I rub a balloon on my hair or some fur, I can smell the static on it, and it’s a similar smell when there’s lightning.
I was wondering about that specifically because the only people I’ve ever asked about it aren’t exactly in touch with their surroundings, so I don’t know what to think of their answers.
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I think a lot of people just need to be clued in that there’s a connection between things like smell and rainstorm. It’s like “Now that you mention it, there is a particular smell before a storm.” Most civilized people just aren’t used to paying attention to the subtler stimuli, on top of their diets and lifestyles dulling them.
I live in a little cube in the central business district of Auckland, New Zealand.
I work the late shift, 3:30pm till midnight, and usually hit bed around 3:30am and sleep till 11am or something like that.
I was still up at 5am the other morning and stood on my balcony.
I had never bothered to pay attention for a long time but I listened to the birds, it was fucking beautiful.
I now no longer use my ipod.
yeah iPods. I kind of hate them. They are like a drug that people use to make it easier to do things they don’t enjoy. Then they want to use them all the time. Like when their jogging or bike riding. I used to be really into recorded music when I was younger. I worked in a record store when I was in my teens and always wanted to have some good music to accompany everything I was doing. I still like to have something on when I’m alone working in my shop or on a long drive somewhere but I find that more and more I choose quiet. Lately I’ve found sometimes I’ll even drive for 6-8 hours on a trip with nothing in the tape deck.
I’ve been thinking lately that this whole idea of having a soundtrack to all of our acivities is kind of wierd and definitely a civilized concept. You see all these people walking around with earphones in their ears, with their own private soundtrack going, isolated from everything around them instead of tuned in to whats around them.
I remember in one of Michal Mcclure’s poetry books he talked about pop music, and i think recorded music in general, as a twisted way for a parasite to try vainly to create some kind of artificial beauty, some manufactured inspiration to continue as its host is about to die and real beauty has been almost fully eradicated.
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