Consciousness is SO yesterday.

Ooooooo....look at the pretty lights.

When I was about 13, my dad and I drove through northern Saskatchewan. I mean way up north, land-of-the-midnight-sun north. It was August, and that far north in August, the sun doesn't really set.

It was late, and we lay side by side on a picnic table and looked up at the sky. We talked about all the things you normally talk about when the full weight of the galaxy is hanging over your head.

The sky on the prairies is impossibly big. If you're from a place that has hills, you can't imagine the bigness of the prairie sky. It's so big that it plays weird tricks with perspective. Cities in the distance seem to float in midair. And when you lie on a picnic table under the crazy-big canopy of stars, talking quietly with your dad about God, you float in midair too, bobbing gently between being smaller and bigger than you really are.

The northern lights eventually came along, probably telling us to shut up and just look. They were as big as the massive prairie sky. And as we watched them fly and dance, we were that big too. Bigger and smaller than we really are.