There was another extraordinary display of the Northern Lights this week, and I hope Moodscopers on the other side of the globe also saw them as the Southern Lights. I’m a bit of a weather nerd – living up on the moors it’s useful to have advance warning of what’s coming – so I’ve been keeping up with news on geomagnetic storms. The sun has been very active recently with some pretty big solar flares, but the storms don’t always result in an aurora display. There was some disappointment earlier in the week, and then on Thursday, whoosh! The sky was relatively clear, and it was full of slowly dancing silent colour.

As I watched, it was the silence of the aurora that filled me most. Standing still in the quiet darkness of the moor, spellbound by the extraordinary unfolding of solar physics in the night sky. When I returned home to sit by the fire in my little cottage – it was a chilly night - I looked to see if I could find some Northern Lights poems. Surprisingly, for you would have thought poets would be entranced by such a grand thing, I couldn’t find much. The only words that resonated were by Walt Whitman in his poem ‘Riddle Song’ in ‘Leaves of Grass’, which starts with:

That which eludes this verse and any verse,

Unheard by sharpest ear, unform'd in clearest eye or cunningest

 mind,

Nor lore nor fame, nor happiness nor wealth,

And yet the pulse of every heart and life throughout the world 

 incessantly,

And in the fourth stanza continues with the lines:

Rich as a sunset on the Norway coast, the sky, the islands, and the 

 cliffs,

Or midnight's silent glowing northern lights unreachable.

There you have it. A riddle that eludes verse, silently glowing, unreachable. Lesser poets would have waxed lyrical about curtains of colours in a lofty firmament of stars, but Whitman nails it as one of the world’s great riddles.

In other news, I’m starting to embark on my own great riddle and move to the far end of the upper dales, deep in the dark skies where the northern lights will be something wonderous to behold – when it isn’t raining! Though to be fair on the upper dales weather, although the rainfall is about twice that of the moors where I live at the moment, they also had clear skies for Thursday’s aurora and the Yorkshire Dales National Park posted some super pictures on their social media.

In the end I didn’t get the historical cottage I was initially looking at. It was beyond my budget, and it would have been too much of a stretch. But another one came up unexpectedly. I’d visited it earlier this year when it was on sale and rather liked it, but was pipped to the post by another buyer. ‘Heigh ho’ I thought, that’s just the ups and downs of house searching; and then a few weeks ago the person selling the house got in touch and asked if I was still interested because the sale had fallen through. So here I am, surrounded by boxes, packing my books. Now, anyone who has packed books will know, this is a task that takes a while because you have to look in each one, read a bit, have a muse of remembering where the book came from and when you read it before. I have until the end of November to pack and then I start a new life!

Have you experienced any elusive riddles in life? Things that you’ve seen or experienced that are not easy or impossible to describe but which impart a sense of wonder.

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member