Sex and yucky stuff in here.  Faint hearts and weak stomachs, beware.

Big HUGE loose end:

oOMisfitOo reminded me:  “… and then there are those of us who can pick up images and emotions from physical things …
When I’m truly in tune, I head to the nearest antique store (because the typical thrift store bums me out) and *listen* to the stories.”

Leaving out psychometry was a terrible oversight.  Greyfox is an ace psychometrist, too.  The day we first met in the flesh, after corresponding and talking by phone, I took with me a “rock”, actually a geode, that I’d carried in my backpack when I lived on the road in the early seventies, and had kept always near since then.  He held it and told me a lot about what had gone on in those years.  Psychometrists also are good at finding lost objects.

I commune with rocks and trees a lot, and so does Doug.  Doug has an especially keen sense for the energies of rocks and crystals, and he has some favorites, such as amethyst.  On our Big Field Trip in ’93-’94 (gotta tell that story sometime… you’ll love it,) I “lost” him in an upscale rock boutique in Santa Fe.  I found him curled up inside a huge amethyst geode.

Wilshak said something intriguing about flat magnetic fields at dawn.  I’m going to try to search that out.  We can see the way the solar wind and earth’s energy fields interact.  Hmmm.  So much to learn….

And if I understood blankity-blank correctly, there was an X-Files episode that had something to do with 2012.  Did I get that right, Scott?  How many of my faithful readers are hip to Timewave Zero?  Does the name Terence McKenna mean anything to anyone?  So many stories to tell….

It’s possible that I have located my long-lost son.  Of course, it’s also possible he will want nothing to do with the mother who abandoned him.  We’ll see.

I’m still working on Statch’s story.  I’m going to grab a little nosh and then settle down with the laptop to write it while another of Doug’s interminable game downloads proceeds over here.  Later, Y’all.

I remember that I promised the story about Statch, and it’s upcoming–sometime.  Yesterday I got very little of my house and garden work done because Greyfox took the day off and took me to Sunshine for lunch.

This was after my ex came over for a beard trim and some minor surgery.  For those of you who have never known the pleasure of having a former spouse as a close friend, let me assure you it’s a delight.

This morning (it’s almost 9 AM here) I’m dealing with email, reading newsletters and such before I get into the work I neglected yesterday.  I found this article that might interest some of you.  It’s a big find for anthropologists and paleontologists.

ajc.com | News | Early hominid

I’ll be back later.

Loose ends:

Anyone with an interest in my search for my 37-year-old long-lost son (I know there are at least two or three of you) may like to know that I finally heard from his father.  It was an abrupt, terse, dismissive note saying that my son, Ron Heft, had been near Globe, Arizona eight years ago, but that he had no further information for me.

Need I add that I immediately tried every people-search within my budget?  Well, that’s what I did and I came up empty.  I’m still looking for Ron.  His full name is William Ronald Heft.  He was born in Wichita, Kansas on Feb. 1, 1965, and his last known whereabouts might have been eight years ago near Globe, Arizona.

dockoonce asked:  ”Must you be in physically close proximity to feel the feelings of others, or just emotionally close?”  As usual, I don’t have a simple answer.  Verbosity R Us!

Passing through a place like Seattle or Phoenix, or taking one of the freeway bypasses around Los Angeles is a harrowing experience.  That much proximity to so many people bombards me with “noise”.  I tense up and have a hard time concentrating.

Some of those signals come through stronger than others.  Sometimes it seems to be the intensity of emotion that makes one stand out.  In other instances, it is something else, some compatibility of mind, maybe something related to a frequency or some “signal signature”. 

It is not “emotional closeness”, because some of my nearest and dearest have no trouble masking their feelings from me, and in fact sometimes have trouble expressing their feelings to me.  But there is some factor that appears to connect minds over long distances, some resonance or rapport.

Here in my big spread-out “neighborhood”, there have been several types of events that have gotten my attention.  One I’ll call “obsessive thought”.  Someone near here, for example, plotted for months about some kind of scam involving a stamp collection.  I picked up on it with empathy for his anxiety, frustration, fear of discovery, and indecision about details of timing and technique.  I also picked up on it through clairvoyance or some sort of visual telepathy, remote viewing, whatever… I could at times see the stamps.   I have no idea who it was, and I think he pulled it off… just a feeling.

And there’s a kid down the street that really wants the girl who won’t even notice him.  And more obsessions of several kinds.  In the kind of crowd that gathers at Sheep Creek Lodge on weekends, maybe forty or so at a time and perhaps as many as 150 circulating through in the course of an evening, at any given time I can sit in the middle of it and connect a few of the conversations I’m overhearing with the subtext carried in the various repetitive tape loops of obsessive thoughts of somewhere around a fifth to a quarter of everyone there.

With most of the crowd, if the bartender is miffed at the cook, three quarters or so of the people there would never suspect it.  The cook and bartender are professionals, and it takes a sensitive individual to pick up on the things they don’t want to show to the customers.  The customers who aren’t picking up on the subtle tension in the air, aren’t contributing much to the psychic ambience, either.  Masking your thoughts also impedes your perception. 

Another kind of events that get my attention are the big things:  earthquakes, novel events, stuff like 9-11, or the time an Iditarod musher was lost for a day and a half.  About ten days before a big earthquake, I feel things start shaking.  I have met a few other people who feel it too.  Other people think we’re imagining things.  Oh, well….  I wish I imagined more.  It’s frustrating having that feeling:

somethin’ happenin’ here,

what it is ain’t exactly clear.

I get enigmatic clues, like “Pinatubo”.  Early morning, hypnogogic state, waking up and there’s that word in my head, “Pinatubo.”  Never heard of it.  Looked it up and learned it was a mountain.  I mentioned this to Doug and Greyfox, largely because Pinatubo has that interesting sound and rhythm.  Ten days or so later, Mt. Pinatubo blew.  Ehhh… I just flashed on the Challenger.  It created a temporo-psychic shockwave, too.

**aside:  This is priceless.  Doug has been asleep over there on the floor.  He sits up and says, “Well, I’m up; what are all these lights here for?”  I say, “Lie back down.  I think you’re still asleep.”  He lies down, muttering, “Well that would explain a few things.”**

Where was I?  Oh!  Big events involving large numbers of people, anywhere, and also anywhere someone who has a special psychic bond with me is invovled in intense events, I sense it.  When some of my “closest”, for want of a better term, buddies are involved, I can smell it… the sea, the smoke of a ceremonial fire, and the blood and guts of disasters that require psychic first aid as urgently as medical aid.

Late one night here, I felt something almost like a blow to the gut.  Instant unease, alarm, a knowledge of deadly danger.  I stayed with it and observed the thing altering and growing as more people got involved.  I knew who some of them were. 

Next morning one of them called and told me that he and another friend had been unloading a snowmachine (sled, snowmobile…iron dog… y’know??) from a pickup truck and the other guy ended up under it with a broken leg.  It was about -30°F, and the first three people on the scene couldn’t move the sled without hurting him more.  Around 1:30 or so, about the time I felt the tone of the situation shift and went to sleep, they’d gotten him out from under it and on the way to the hospital.

Some years ago at the Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival a woman was raped and a man was killed by being pushed into the river when he was drunk.  I could sense her terror, and not too long after it happened I spoke to a security man who confirmed that it had been reported.  I was also sensing the emotions of the rapist. 

However, I did not sense any of the drunken brawl that led to the other man’s death.  Everyone learned of the death next day when the body was discovered.  There were no witnesses and I never heard of a suspect being arrested in the case. A year or two after that, I picked up on some obsessing about getting away with murder.  The man projecting those thoughts was one of the local rowdy drunks.  Is there a connection?  I’m not sure.  When any drunk comes to me for a reading, I send him or her away.  It’s futile to try to do something like that for someone under the influence of a depressant drug.

And that brings to mind the contractual contacts, the bonds formed when a client trusts me to look at his inner life and advise him.  With very few exceptions, for those who consult me, I can sense enough about their attitudes and situation to intelligibly interpret a card spread or runecast or other oracle to answer their questions.  The exceptions are usually people I don’t connect with for some reason or no reason at all.  I don’t know where the causality is, or if there is a cause.  With some we click, with others we don’t.

Once in a while, I encounter someone who is a psychic blank.  One time a young woman came into my house and passed a doobie with me and two or three others, and I didn’t notice she was there until someone called my attention to her.  With nothing but the other five senses to indicate her presence, I’m chagrined to confess, she blended into the background for me. 

Some people with severe FAS are blank.  Trauma, fevers, and toxins can trigger acquisition or loss of various senses for some people, and in telepathy as in other mental processes, feedback focuses and intensifies the signal.  The electronic web is building a psychic web by providing another channel for feedback.

Isn’t that right, Sarah darlin’?

My darlin’ oOMisfitOo‘s comment about exploding dice did conjure a comic image for me.  Say we had two or more of us *nudging* the ol’ galloping dominoes around, each of us trying for a different result.  One possibility, of course, is that we’d cancel each other out.  Then there’s the possibility that one of us would be a bit stronger than the other(s), and would concentrate harder, to overcome the resistance, and the dice would go flying… could put someone’s eye out. 

To carry on with this theme, and expand a bit on my PK experiences:  I soon found that PK was hard work.  It would leave me exhausted and trembling at the end of a session.  It would be another 12-15 years before I learned enough about brain chemistry to understand that I was depleting neurotransmitters.  When I started playing with dice, I was eighteen.  When I achieved some very strange English on the pool table, I was 22.  I never tried any of that stuff in competition against others after that time.  I was never able to see any effect when I experimented alone.  My best guess regarding that is that either I needed the motivation of the competition and the wagers, or that there was some “field” effect and I was drawing energy from the group, or both. 

I came to the conclusion after a while that cheating my friends was not a good idea.  I never had any desire to seek out a clandestine semi-pro crap game among strangers.  I was really very timid then, compared to the way I am now.  The image of me in a smoky back room of some bar shooting craps with the usual crowd of miscreants was, and still is, ludicrous.  I was far, far away from any casinos.  I used to head-trip about going to Vegas and winning big bucks on the craps tables. 

Fortunately for me, before I got to where I might have played in a casino, I’d learned enough about the casino business to know that it wouldn’t have been prudent to try to cash in on those skills there.  Where gambling is a business, the house monitors things to make sure that it keeps the edge.  Occasionally, I’ve heard stories about psychics disappearing.  I personally know one who got shot because of what she knew of someone’s illegal activities.  I’ve been lucky that way, to have survived long enough to learn to be circumspect.  For the record, I know nuffink.

In all seriousness, to set the record straight about my psychic abilities, I am primarily an empath.  I feel what others around me are feeling.  It’s not words, or “thoughts”, but emotional energy.  This made me a washout in the field of nursing and has driven me out of cities and into these woods.  Even so, my neighbors’ marital squabbles, legal troubles, etc., get through to me.  Unless I have a strong feeling it concerns me, I just tune it out.  I avoid crowds as much as I can.  They exhaust me.

My next strongest talent is as a projective telepath.  In my normal beta brainwave state, I’m a good transmitter.  I used to attract men that way, just by looking at the backs of their necks.  [Try it sometime.  You might be surprised how many people turn to look when you focus on the back of their neck.]  With the boost from an adrenaline surge or a shot of meth, I blow people away. 

My son, Doug, is a willful young man, a Leo born in the year of the Cock.  He also has ADHD.  When he was young, I discovered that I could get him to comply with my wishes more efficiently by thinking at him than if I spoke.  When I am in distress, it is common for Doug or Greyfox to sense it.  It is also common, at such times, for me to get phone calls from Sarah or my daughter Angie, just “checking” to see if I’m okay.  Sarah and I have such a strong rapport that it’s hard to tell who’s sending and who’s receiving.

Precog works best for me on the unconscious level, on “autopilot”.  During my speed freak days I once got up from a table without a thought and went out the back door as the police were coming up the front steps.  I’ve no idea how many accidents or other mishaps I might have avoided that way, but I clearly recall one time I suppressed the urge not to go somewhere, and spent an uncomfortable evening in the ER, kicking myself for it. 

One day here a year or so ago, Doug was watching over my shoulder as I played with the Precog Trainer from Xxaxxsoft.com.  I had been doing slightly worse than chance until I put on my headphones with a Theta state CD.  Then I got an unbroken series of hits, until I heard a nervous laugh from Doug and started laughing too.  I keep thinking about digging out that Precog CD again, but other activities (Xanga, housework, Xanga, etc.) take up my time.

I restore my depleted neurotransmitters and enhance my telepathic receptivity with “smart drugs” such as DMAE and phosphatidyl serine (and others), and when I’m doing readings for clients I usually have a CD on to keep my brainwaves in the Theta frequency range.  Sometimes, I use the “shamanic counseling” method developed by Michael Harner, where the client is also in Theta state.  The most intense shared consciousness experience I ever had was at Page Browning’s wedding on Ken Kesey’s farm in 1969.  We had a tall cylinder of nitrous oxide.  We started out standing up around the tank.  Then after a few of us fell down a few times (I was the first to go), the tank was laid on its side and we all sat around it.

I’ve no idea how long this went on.  Time loses its meaning on such occasions.  We were conversing without sound for quite a while.  At one point I realized I could feel the sensation of my lover’s boots on his feet when he wiggled his toes, and he said later that he could feel my sandals on my feet.  This was my first and only such experience, but I got the impression that it was old hat to the Merry Pranksters.  Nitrous is dangerous and the hangover I had afterward discouraged me from indulging much after that.  I do, occasionally, finish off the gas in the can after the kid uses up the last of the whipped cream.

I’ll be back later, with the story on Statch and my oh-so-brief career as a hooker.

Before I slide back into the time tunnel, I want to correct a misconception stated by LuckyStars.  I’m not now, nor have I ever been, “normal”.  Normalcy is for average folk.  I’m weird, and if it didn’t just come natural, I’d have to work at it.  What my life and my efforts at healing have brought me to is not normality, but better mental health.  Normal people in this culture are neurotic.  I’d rather be different, thank you anyway.

FAILURE

I knew when I let Marie go with Bobbi that I’d failed as a parent.  I knew it before then, when my child begged me to let her go with this babysitter.  What I didn’t know until about sixteen years later when I found Marie again was that Bobbi and her family had done a bit of brainwashing on my child, stolen her affections, and manipulated both of us to get a child the easy way.  Bobbi didn’t think she could have children of her own.  I’ll go into that some more when I come to it.

For now, it’s back to the late summer of 1963.

My coping style back then was, when something hurt to think about, I just didn’t think about it.  I found other things to occupy my mind.  My immediate need at the time was a job.  An opening came up at Town and Country Drive-In on the corner of Pawnee and Seneca, just outside the main gate of McConnell Air Force Base.  I’d worked there before and was happy to go back.

Another girl there, named Marva but called Dusty, was new to town and needed a place to live.  We pooled our resources and got a two bedroom apartment together.  It wasn’t furnished, and stayed that way for a few weeks until we saved up enough tips to put some cheap furnishings in there. 

First we slept on piles of clothes on the bare floor, then moved up to mattresses on the floor and finally got beds, a couch and everything we needed except a kitchen table and chairs.  The kitchen was just where the fridge lived.  When we cooked (about once every two weeks), we sat on the floors and ate from paper plates. 

We were both going out with airmen in the Air Police squadron.  I had met my boyfriend Earl almost as soon as I’d started that job.  He spent every night of my final week in the old apartment there with me.  The sex was good, and it was frequent… all night every night.  His buddies kidded me that he was falling asleep on watch, and that this skinny Cajun guy had lost ten pounds the first week he knew me.  They said I should give him a break, but Earl didn’t see it that way.  When I think of him now, the image that comes to mind is me bouncing naked astride him, both of us laughing.

After Dusty and I moved into the new place together with a lot of help from the USAF, APs could be found at our apartment almost every day.  The guys started referring to the place as “Rusty and Dusty’s Pad”.  It became a routine on payday twice a month for them to bring in a bag of groceries and have Dusty and me cook a big pot of stew or something that would feed everyone.  The guys had cars and by pooling our cash we managed a lot of cheap fun.

Casual, low-stakes gambling was common and popular with that crowd.  They’d have chugalug contests, betting on who could swallow a quart of beer the fastest.  I won frequently because all that was required was to get it down long enough to pick up the stakes.  Then I could go puke it up, and I always did.  Soon they declared I was just wasting beer, and excluded me from their contests.

One payday, the living room was packed and the crowd was circulating through the arch into the kitchen.  There was music and lots of laughter and loud conversation.  A small group went into my bedroom and laid out a blanket on the floor, shut the door and began a quiet crap game.  I joined… and I won.  They whacked me good-naturedly on the back and declared that I was one lucky redhead.

I don’t recall how I responded, or whether I really did respond.  My mind was spinning with what had just happened.  I’d read in the books by J.B. Rhine about experiments with dice.  Some people could influence the way they fell through telekinesis (now more commonly referred to as psychokinesis or PK).  Others could predict how they would fall through precognition.  (We just say, “precog”, now.)  I had the feeling that I had been doing some of both.

This was intriguing.  Think about it.  I was already fascinated with the topic of ESP.  I was also very money-hungry as well as competitive.  I’m one of those people who loves to win but doesn’t hate to lose, the happiest of competitors.  These crap games could only occur on paydays, so I’d have to wait two weeks each time for the next one.  If no one else suggested it, I would.   I was really hooked, but the way I played it wasn’t a gambling addiction.

Eventually, I’d won so often that I was accused of cheating but there was no possibility of any loaded dice or anything of that sort.  They furnished the dice themselves. 

I, of course, wasn’t talking about what I was doing, but I was getting better at it all the time.  At first, it was only when I threw the dice myself that I had an edge.  Then I started winning a lot of side bets on other people’s play, just by paying close attention to the dice as they fell, giving them a little *nudge* onto the face of my preference.

The frequent losers who had kept coming back time after time to try and get even, finally got mad.  They didn’t know what was going on but they figured I had to be to blame for it.  They would refuse to play in my room, and then in that apartment, but if they let me play I’d still win, wherever we went. 

Attitudes turned ugly.  I lost friends.  A few guys persisted, as if it was important to them to shoot down the top gun or something.  I no longer wanted to play at all.  What’s the use of playing to lose?  And if winning is penalized, what’s the use of playing?  A few years later I would go through a similar cycle of experience when someone taught me to shoot pool.  I’ll get to that, eventually.

Rusty and Dusty’s Pad soon disappeared.  Dusty and her man decided to get married.  Earl went on a TDY (temp assignment somewhere) and while he was gone I fucked the friend he had assigned to watch over me and keep me from fucking anyone else. 

I found a job closer to the middle of town at another drive-in which had once been part of the Town & Country chain, but under new ownership was called the Buggy Whip.  They hauled an old buggy onto the roof to catch attention.  I found a cheap studio apartment nearby, and my friend Statch helped me move.

I’ve just been wondering whether it might be better to quit here.  There is a lot to tell about Statch, and this blog is pretty long already.  Greyfox just helped me make the decision by pulling into the driveway, so, for now… later.

Book Review:

Jolie Blon’s Bounce

by James Lee Burke

Simon & Schuster, 2002

Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the sheriff’s department in New Iberia, Louisiana.  He has been one of my favorite fictional cops for years and years.  The little girl he adopted, after he pulled her out of a wrecked airplane under the waters of a swamp, is now grown and ready for college.  I’ve loved Dave all this time, through at least half a dozen books.

As Burke draws him, “Streak” Robicheaux is a man I can admire.  Most of the time, he keeps his anger and his inner demons in check.  When the control slips, though, is often when the stories get really intense and fascinating.  I was well into the climax last night and trying hard to finish the book, but I nodded off a couple of times and had to put it down.  This morning, I tried to finish it before breakfast, but starved out and ended up grabbing a quick bite and diving back into the book.

Of all the books in this series, Jolie Blon’s Bounce is the only one with so much sheer weirdness, supernatural shivery stuff.  One of its bad guys is about as evil as they come, and the rest aren’t anything to poke fun at, either.

Early in the book, Dave muses:

When we are injured emotionally or systematically humiliated or made to feel base about ourselves in our youth, we are seldom given the opportunity later to confront our persecutors on equal terms and to show them up for the cowards they are.  So we often create a surrogate scenario in which the vices of our tormentors, the fears that fed their cruelty, the self-loathing that drove them to hurt the innocent, eventually consume them and make the worthy of pity and in effect drive them from our lives.

But sometimes the dark fate that should have been theirs just does not shake properly out of the box.

I know this.  I’ve imagined my tormentors’ comeuppance many times and have sometimes encountered them later and found them apparently untouched by the harm they’d visited on others.  Real life is often unfair, and good fiction reflects that.

Later on, this very fallible hero says, “…the worst deeds human beings commit are precipitated by a happenstance meeting of individuals and events, who and which, if they were rearranged only slightly, would never leave a bump in our history.”  So true!

And I’m right there in emphatic agreement with him when he thinks, “God bless all reference librarians everywhere.”

One more quote I can’t resist sharing–Sigmund Freud is supposed to have said:  “Ah, thank you for showing me all of mankind’s lofty ideals.  Now let me introduce you to the basement.”   There is a lot of that subterranean material here.

In my anything but humble opinion, the only thing wrong with this book is the fault of spell-check, one of the worst things to befall writing and publishing since the beginning of time.  One example:  “peeling” where it should have said, “pealing”.  These are things any competent human proofreader can deal with.  I’d wager that Burke originally typed it correctly and the mindless robotic proofer changed it to a more common, but in this case quite incorrect, word.  I find instances of this all the time.  Isn’t it interesting that these innovations supposed to improve the readability of prose end up making it worse?

READ THIS BOOK, anyway.

MOVIE REVIEW:

FROM HELL (viewed on DVD)

Allan Moore’s un-comic of the same name provided the theme and much of the visual feel–some scenes could have been storyboarded directly from the graphic novel–but from there the Hughes Brothers took it and ran.

Moore told the story from the POV of Jack the Ripper.  Hollywood couldn’t have that.  Its protagonist had to be a  hero.  The movie’s hero is loosely based on the detective inspector who failed to catch the real Ripper.

So we get to see Johnny Depp smoke opium, drink laudanum-laced absinthe, have gory, tortured visions, and fall sweetly in love with Whitechapel bangtail Heather Graham.  The plot and casting are pure hollywood, pitched to appeal to us:  you and me.  Not that there is anything wrong with that–those pretty actresses are no match for the rundown and beatup whores Jack dissected.  And Depp is so much easier on the eyes than the faceless Ripper of the “comic book”!

Ripperologists will notice that the Hughes guys chose the sexiest conspiracy theory for the identity of their killer.  If you’re not a ripperologist, you may not know that the perp was never conclusively identified.   Suspects and theories abound, but none with better stories or more popular appeal than the one presented here.

Chronology, geography, and many details of the crimes themselves are eerily accurate.  If you like blood and gore, keep the remote handy to stop motion.  Prosthetic gore is plentiful, but only in the briefest flashes.  Would you believe me–and would it be a spoiler for you–if I tell you they have even contrived a happy Hollywood-style ending?

When I quit writing last night, with that image in my mind of my adorable nearly-four-year-old Marie torn apart because she couldn’t have both of the “mommies” she loved, I was hurting.  It’s just as LuckyStars supposes:  there is some pain involved in pulling these old buried memories out of their closet.  Like surgery without anaesthetic, like debriding a wound so it can heal cleanly, this is not an easy process.

Still, I am gaining something here.  Keeping this stuff locked inside doesn’t give me a chance to heal the wounds.  I’ve been wounded ‘way long enough, guys.  If it hurts you to read it, then maybe you should read someone else’s stuff.  But I know how compelling stories such as this can be and I don’t expect many of you to turn away from this.

Each time I come to a place where it simply hurts too much to go on, I stop.  I breathe deeply and turn to other matters while my subconscious processing goes on.  Revisiting my past mistakes lets me reassess things in the light of wisdom and insight gained over the course of four decades.  It all looks very different from here and now.

The woman I was then hated herself.  Now I love her, and I love me, and yes, it does sometimes feel like we’re not the same person.  But I know we are–I am–I have experienced all this time with continuity, even though in this episodic life of mine I have put on and discarded many personae.  In the period of time I’m writing about, I made up a lot of fantasy-lives for myself.  I pretended to be what I wasn’t, because I didn’t like what I was.  I don’t have to do that any more.

Now I have a couple of reviews to post.  Then there are more of those pesky household tasks to do.  I expect to get back to the saga of my younger self sometime this evening.  Thank you for the feedback everyone.  I have long wanted this story to be told.  I’ve had many people tell me, after hearing small bits of it, that I should “write a book.”  With your help, it’s getting done now.  Yea, Xanga!

One of the greatest things about winter here is that the sky gets dark enough to see the Aurora Borealis.  Sometimes it is as bright as three full moons.  We can turn off the lights and enjoy the shifting colors.  But those nights are rare.  More commonly, it will be fine veils or streaks or streamers of cool colors, clear across the sky, shifting and shimmering.

The space shuttle flew through a cloud of aurora.  Imagine that.

Shamans in the north chant and dance to call the aurora.  Sometimes I hear it singing.

Auroras Underfoot

Photo credit:  “Curtis” (probably Jan Curtis) and SpaceWeather.com