Much of my photography lately has been small - macro shots, close enough to count the hairs on a bud, to find the hidden sun inside a single bloom. This one asked the opposite of me. To put the camera down for a moment, tip my head all the way back, and remember how big it all is. This picture was taken last summer at our cabin on Lake Manitoba. And the aurora was every bit as luminous as it looks here - great curtains of green light rolling and falling across the whole sky, a wash of rose along the top, the lake and the land below gone soft and green in its glow. I have thousands of incredible aurora pictures from last summer, but the sky this night stands out prominently in my mind. A photo can only hold so much of a thing like that. You really had to stand under it to understand its greatness. I'm not sure I have words for what it felt like to witness this, so I'll just say what it was: a whisper from my dad who was watching from heaven. A gentle insistence that I stop, and be still, and look up - that I step outside myself and my worries for a minute and take in how vast and well-ordered and beautiful being a part of this big picture really is. It's easy to live down at the scale of our troubles. They feel like the whole sky sometimes. But every now and then the actual sky opens up and reminds you that you are a small part of something enormous and luminous and good - and that being small inside something that big is not a lonely thing at all. It's a held thing. A warm hug.