October 8th, Fourteenth of July Bay, Krossfjorden, Spisbergen  79.2Ą N 12ĄE

We have been out two nights, a hundred year old schooner populated by fourteen artists, two scientists, and a crew of four, and already we have met a phenonemon of nature that cannot be captured in an image.  The aurora borealis is a beautiful piece of natural performance art cannot be filmed or photographed.  A time-lapse photo reveals only fuzzy colors, and a moving image cannot get enough light to capture the dynamic strangeness of it all.  The Northern lights have been painted as hanging, shimmering curtains of multicolored fire, and old engravings show an imaginary fierce luminosity that wants to leap from the page into our minds.

It is the aurora that makes me more than smile, but open my mouth into an astonished "O."  I have seen it many times before but it is never less beautiful or surprising than before.  We can make art out of it but we cannot ever replay it.  The images we snap and flash can only be the starting point.

The sublime, said the philosophers, is not as fine as the beautiful, because it impresses us because of how giant it is, and how impossible to touch.  That quality in nature that leaves us in awe because it is always beyond the fact of our gaze, the extent of our reach.  We are as small as it is great, as we seem hardly to make any mark upon this grand arctic expanse. Beauty, instead, should be something more, something we can choose to contemplate, rather than be always humbled by.

And yet this giant beauty today seems ours to pollute, to warm, to melt out of existence.  We must honor those facts of nature that are greater than any ability of us to destroy, or ignore.  The force of the wilderness smacks us across the face, and its grandeur must always burn, in our hearts, in our thoughts.