I’ve got a couple of cold mid-winter destinations for your hump day break this week. If you didn’t get to take a trip to Times Square for New Years Eve – or if you fell asleep in the La-Z-Boy before the stroke of midnight – we’ve got that cued up for you here:
NYE Times Square from The Timelapse Group on Vimeo.
In another vein entirely, here’s a spectacular look at one of earth’s most majestic sights – and that’s saying a lot – the northern lights, Aurora Borealis. If I lived in Norway, or as my great grandparents did, in Sweden, I think I would spend many a night bundled up outdoors, gazing skyward at this magnificent and ever-changing panorama.
One of my favorite poets has long been Robert Service, a bard who wrote thousands of lines about life in the Yukon. The style may be dated – not too many poets these days do rhyming verse – but the word pictures he crafted will sometimes give you a shiver, and not just because they describe life above the Arctic Circle. Here’s a brief excerpt about the northern lights from one of his epic poems:
They rolled around with a soundless sound like softly bruised silk;
They poured into the bowl of the sky with the gentle flow of milk.
In eager, pulsing violet their wheeling chariots came,
Or they poised above the Polar rim like a coronal of flame.
From depths of darkness fathomless their lancing rays were hurled,
Like the all-combining search-lights of the navies of the world.
There on the roof-pole of the world as one bewitched I gazed,
And howled and grovelled like a beast as the awful splendors blazed.
My eyes were seared, yet thralled I peered
through the parka hood nigh blind;
But I staggered on to the lights that shone, and never I looked behind.
— from The Ballad of the Northern Lights by Robert Service