Some nights at the lake, the aurora arrives like weather. This night, it arrived like music. The water in this photo tells you everything about the stillness. Lake Manitoba can throw a chop with the best of them, but that evening it lay flat as a Manitoba Canola field, repeating the sky's colors back to it - green answering green across the surface. No wind. Hardly a sound. Just the stars by the thousands, and these colors pulsing along the horizon. And then the red came. Aurora watchers will know what I mean when I say red feels extra. There's a science to it - the colors come from gases glowing at different altitudes, and while the familiar green dances relatively low, the red blooms only at the very top of the display, in the thinnest reaches of our atmosphere, over a hundred miles higher still. Red means the show is tall. Red means the sky is reaching as far up as it can go. The high notes, in other words. The ones the song saves for when it really means it. So when those crimson columns lit up over the lake, my mind went straight to that old song, Elevate My Mind - I wanna go higher (higher, baby). The whole sky had stretched itself to its fullest height, and still I wanted more. But Mother Nature keeps her own setlist, so I sat back and let her play. Quiet on the ground. Music up above. A song I could have looped all night.