I stayed up a few nights this winter watching this view from my bed as I tried to fall asleep. And some nights I stayed up setting up my camera and tripod to try to capture the magic.
At 2am one night in March, when most of the town was asleep, I was awake with the sky dancing with flaming auroras. Waiting, holding my breath, for what felt like forever for my camera's shutter to... well, shut.
It took about a hundred blurry photos to only end up with a couple good ones.
But this photo almost perfectly captures the magic. Just almost, because no pictures or even video can ever make them real justice. You just have to be there, under the bare sky, causing yourself neck pain looking up for so long, utterly mesmerised. You can barely move, as not to scare them away, yet you have a such strange urge to jump and dance that you can barely stand still at all.
I've seen the northern lights countless times just in the past few years alone.
But seeing them from my bedroom window like THIS is a special kind of magic.
My last apartment faced North and had a lake view, so I still got a front-row seat to the dancing lights from my bed there. But the city lights made it so I had to walk out on the frozen lake to be able to see them this brightly, or to take any pictures of them.
But here, in my forest home, with no light pollution... It's amazing how brightly they shine here.
I usually fall asleep super quickly, but sometimes I twist and turn restlessly, feeling something in my bones that tells me to open my eyes, and then I do, and the sky is aflame. I can't explain it. I just know somehow when the lights are there, and am almost always awake to see them when they appear.
It makes sense that they're the source of so many a myth and legend. The northern lights are magical. And absolutely indescribable. No matter if you've seen them once or countless times, they'll always snatch your breath away.
I'd miss the thunderstorms and the rain, but if it were to always be winter and this could always be the view from my bedroom window... I wouldn't be mad.
Winter or not, this is the perfect place for my storyteller soul to find magic to turn into fantasy worlds.