When the Fire Fox Came to Colorado
Fall – Week 47 – On Unbidden Gifts and Arctic Foxes
In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures – and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.
The ancient Finns called it revontulet, fire fox. Believing that somewhere in the Arctic darkness, a mystical fox races across the tundra. As it runs with wild abandon, its magnificent tail sweeps snowflakes skyward. Each crystal catching moonlight until the heavens themselves ignite. Or perhaps, as other tellings suggest, the fox’s tail brushes against mountaintops, striking sparks that set the night ablaze with color. Standing on my deck in Colorado some nights past, watching ribbons of green and pink unfurl across familiar stars, I understand why our ancestors needed stories to hold such wonder.
I had chased this phenomenon to the edges of the world. Iceland’s black sand beaches, Greenland’s ice-locked fjords – always arriving too late or too early, under skies too cloudy or too calm. The aurora had remained elusive, a ghost story told by luckier travelers, a shimmer always just beyond the horizon of my experience. Yet here it was, finding me at home, transforming the sky above Gunbarrel Hill into something otherworldly. The irony wasn’t lost on me: all those expeditions to the Arctic Circle, and the fire fox had chosen to visit my own backyard.
Earlier that day, I’d heard whispers of possibility – solar storms, magnetic conditions aligning. So before dinner, hope pulled us outside to scan the northern sky. At first, what we saw seemed ordinary. A peculiar cloud formation, perhaps, or the reflection of the distant city lights of Longmont. But then the green began to pulse, to breathe, to dance. “There! Do you see it?” The tentative hope erupting into certainty. Because even when you’re looking for magic, even when you’ve been told it might come, the moment it arrives still takes your breath away.
The aurora that night was liquid light, alive and restless. It moved like water, like silk curtains in wind, like the very breathing of the atmosphere itself. The green dominated, that distinctive, electric shade of oxygen atoms releasing solar energy. Then pink flushed through it in waves, nitrogen’s blush joining the dance.
Standing there, barefoot on cold deck boards, I thought of that Finnish fox, its white fur invisible against snow, only the black tip of its tail marking its passage as it runs through the cold night. In the story, the fox is neither fleeing nor hunting, it simply runs for the joy of running, for the wild freedom of movement across the endless sky. And in that running, in that pure expression of life, it creates beauty that spans continents, that pulls people from their warm houses to stand shivering in wonder.
The science tells us something different but no less magical: solar wind, magnetosphere, charged particles funneling toward the poles along invisible field lines. But knowing the mechanism doesn’t diminish the miracle. If anything, it deepens it. That we live on a planet wrapped in an invisible shield that turns solar storms into art, that raw power becomes instead this celestial theater.
For almost an hour, the lights performed above my home. They shifted from curtains to spirals, from waves to something like calligraphy, writing messages in the November sky. The pinks intensified, then faded, then bloomed again.
My neighbors emerged, drawn by the same ancient pull that has brought humans to look upward during auroral displays for millennia. Across the country we stood in our driveways and yards, strangers made intimate by shared awe. Someone said they’d lived here forty years and never seen anything like it. Another remembered their grandmother in Minnesota talking about the lights from her childhood. We were all children in that moment, the aurora stripping away our careful adult composures, returning us to wonder.
I thought of my nights in Iceland, joining a tour that promised aurora sightings, scanning clouded skies from stopped vehicles on empty roads. Hours spent willing the weather to lift, watching clouds instead of lights, mistaking every break in the overcast for the beginning of the show that never came. And Greenland, dog sledding from hut to hut through Arctic silence. Just the dogs’ breathing, runners whispering on snow. That profound quiet, but no aurora. All those northern expeditions, all that searching in the very lands where the fire fox was said to run, and here it was, painting my Colorado garden with subtle green shadows, reflecting in my own window glass.
There’s something to be said for the gifts that come unbidden, for the wonders that find us when we stop searching.
As the display began to fade, slowly, reluctantly, like theater lights dimming after the final curtain – I remained on my deck, unwilling to break the spell by moving inside. The everyday world was reasserting itself: the familiar outline of fir trees, the sound of cars on distant roads, the ordinary stars resuming their quiet burning. But something had shifted. The sky I thought I knew, the sky that had arched over my home every night, had revealed itself capable of transformation, of magic, of visits from Arctic foxes made of light and legend.
The Sámi people of the Arctic traditionally warned against whistling at the aurora, believing it might sweep you up into its dance, carry you away into the sky. Standing there as the last whispers faded into darkness, I understood the danger they sensed. Not that the lights would literally lift us from Earth, but that having seen them, having been touched by their wild beauty, we would never again be content with ordinary darkness. We would always be listening for the footfalls of the fire fox, watching for the sweep of its magnificent tail across our skies.
In the days that followed, I found myself returning to the deck each evening, scanning the northern horizon with new attention. The aurora didn’t return, fire foxes keep their own counsel, but the watching had changed. Every sunset and sunrise seemed more precious, every star more intentional. The sky had shown me its capacity for surprise, for gift-giving, for bringing the far north to my Colorado home.
Perhaps this is the true power of the aurora, whether we explain it through physics or foxes: it reminds us that we live on a planet alive with wonder, that the extraordinary can arrive without a passport or planning. And, that sometimes the journeys we take to find beauty are less important than the attention we pay to the beauty that finds us. The fire fox runs where it will, its tail painting stories across the sky, reminding us that wonder isn’t something we outgrow, only that our attention wandered.
—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.
As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.
Love,
Jane