Evergreen Reads to Empower Your Mind
The Standard Sister
Note no.24
Science & Spirit
November 30, 2025
Hello Stranger
There are encounters that create something that couldn’t have existed before—a brief, unplanned moment where two elements meet and generate new movement, new energy. It happens between people, between ideas, and it happens in nature itself. Cultures living under the northern sky once tried to explain this phenomenon in their own ways, and some even linked it to the quick movement of a fox across the snow. Today, we understand it more precisely: a meeting between charged particles and the atmosphere. This article begins with the physics behind the Northern Lights and extends to a broader question—what the encounter that produces light in the sky can teach us about the encounters that shape us.
Meeting the Aurora Borealis (The Northern Lights)
Article by The Standard Sister
One phenomenon that seems to appear on nearly everyone’s “once in a lifetime” list is witnessing the Northern Lights. The images circulating online promise a singular, almost spiritual experience—a moment when nature feels bigger than life itself. Perhaps it’s because routine, work, and city life gradually dull our capacity for awe, and sometimes it takes an extraordinary sight to wake it up again. The Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis, are skies illuminated by slow-moving bands of green, purple, and pink light drifting across the horizon. Behind the spectacle we’ve all seen in photos lies a surprisingly simple physical explanation—one that makes the phenomenon even more compelling: the sun releases solar wind, a stream of charged particles. Most of the time, Earth’s magnetic field protects us, but near the poles the shield weakens, allowing the particles to enter the atmosphere. There, they collide with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen, “charging” them with energy. When the atoms release that energy, they emit light—green from oxygen, purple from nitrogen, and combinations of both. It’s not light coming from the sun or from the atmosphere alone—it’s the result of the encounter between them. Long before science explained the phenomenon, the cultures living under these skies interpreted the lights in their own ways. The Sámi people of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland believed the lights were ancestral spirits, and that whistling
under them could accidentally summon their attention. The Vikings viewed the
Inger Meyer
lights as the shimmering armor of the Valkyries—supernatural warriors riding through the sky, gathering the souls of brave fighters and carrying them to Valhalla, a sign of protection, courage, and an honorable death. And in ancient Finland, people told of a swift fire fox whose tail brushed against the snow and ice, sending sparks of light into the sky—an image preserved in language itself: the Finnish word for the Northern Lights, revontulet, literally means “fox fire.” These myths reveal how humans have always tried to make sense of light that arrives from beyond—sometimes as fear, sometimes as a message from the heavens, and sometimes simply as wonder. Thinking about the Northern Lights led me to consider the kinds of encounters that create new forms of light in human life. Intimate relationships that lead to new beginnings; professional collaborations that produce ideas capable of reshaping reality, like WhatsApp; brief contact between a hand and a paintbrush that results in art that lasts for generations—Van Gogh’s Sunflowers; or friendships that give two people the strength to grow. In life, as in nature, we are charged
through others: people, places, experiences—anything that touches us and pushes us forward. And if we’re willing to grow from that encounter, the outcome is meaningful; but the most striking part is often the moment of impact itself, when something external activates something internal.
Three years ago, I arrived alone in Venice in the middle of winter, without a plan or intention beyond simply being there. That kind of arrival—without expectations—allowed me to meet the city as it was, and let it meet me as I was. From that encounter, my first book eventually emerged. According to quantum theory, we too are made of particles that respond to contact. The atmosphere responds to solar wind; we respond to people and experiences. It may sound emotional, but at its core lies a simple physical principle: an encounter changes structure. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.