Intersections: 024 — Fascinating Fascinations

November 23rd, 2025

I’m trying to be better about my phone usage, acutely aware how a quick glance can become a stolen hour of time from my partner. But I’m also abundantly aware of how awesome the little device is.

The problem is not the phone itself, but my potential to use it...unwisely. I’ve landed on some loose rules for keeping it out of reach - no phone at the dinner table, in the bedroom, yadda yadda. But when the northern lights come out to play, all rules are off (including bedtime!). You’d best believe I’m lifting screen to sky and buzzing friends late at night with an “OMG LOOK UP!”.

Solar activity tends to happen in a cycle that spans eleven Earth-years, and it just so happens we’re at a peak. I distinctly remember the last time this was the case: St. Patrick’s Day, 2014. Walking home with friends late that evening, a shimmer in the periphery became a wide-eyed realization that the northern lights were out in full force - green on green on green, reflecting the shamrock colour of the day. We settled on a dark patch of grass alongside a Winnipeg bridge, our group getting larger as wandering strangers stopped and joined - quietly watching together in reverie.

This year, it is on Remembrance Day that the sky opens up and draws our gaze above the streetlights - reds popping like a poppy, dancing with greens across the sky in a gentle sway. An Uber driver pulls into a loading zone next to me as I stand stunned on the sidewalk. He looks where I’m looking and I hear an audible, “Whoa...” from his rolled down window.

With any storm, I find its magic is in the serendipity; something wild washing over one and all, a humbling reminder of one’s existence. And so it was when it caught me and the Uber driver offguard on a routine trip around the block.

There are a few things that awe me about this:

1. The northern lights - obviously.
2. The camera technology - a phone can take a steady handheld 3 second exposure, whereas previously this was only possible with a tripod and camera (AND the knowhow on how to use these things!).
3. The communications technology - instantaneous sharing.

From pocket to sharing, it’s seamless. But there is a risk in how it’s so smooth: we don’t slow down to appreciate the wonder of it all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about wildness lately, thanks in part to rereading Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild.

Snyder draws a distinction between wilderness (places set apart, preserved, mapped) and wildness (something that resists domestication and erupts anywhere, even in the heart of a city).

The northern lights feel like this kind of wildness. They happen when the sun decides, doing their thing whether we’re witnessing it or not; being, completely.

What strikes me is how our technology mediates this wildness in contradictory ways. An app tries to tame the aurora with prediction and certainty: "KP index 8.23, visibility good between 10pm and midnight, 73% chance of spontaneous amazingness in the sky.” We attempt to capture it, box it into rectangular screens, encapsulate it into a suspended memory.

Yet the wildness persists.

I wrestle with the challenge of embracing wildness in a modern context; how we might live with wildness rather than apart from it. A phone is both a barrier and a bridge - distancing from direct experience, but also extending my perception, connection, attention.

It becomes about holding both: the direct encounter with something wild and unpredictable, and these new tools that are themselves products of undomesticated human creativity. The aurora above and the smartphone in hand are natural expressions of forces - one cosmic and ancient, the other collective and emergent.

The key is to be mindful, rather than mindless; a distinction that can transform the same action into different experiences. My late yoga teacher Jonathan Austman used to say with a wink, “If you’re going to smoke, really smooooooke!” Instead of slipping into habitual automation, being present changes everything.

It always seems to come back to slowing down.

After a chilly few hours gazing at the northern lights from our balcony, my partner naps on the couch in her snowsuit. The greens continue to dance across the horizon, outlasting us.

Sweet dreams are to be had - with a couple of snores to keep it real.

David