Edible Northern Lights…
It took almost a week to hitch hike from San Diego to Juneau, Alaska. The solar flares were lining up to be spectacular this season, and the Moonman Mistress: Solar Flare cookies sealed safely away in my backpack, promised my viewing of the Aurora Borealis those sun flares created to be even better.
I jumped off the Big Rig into a small slushy dirt puddle just outside town, and gave my deepest thanks to Rick, my roughnecks chauffeur over the past 250 miles or so, as I pulled my backpack down from the seat. We’d bonded over listening to Willy, Johnny, and Hank. But things got a little awkward around politics and religion, and the last 100 miles had gotten a little quite.
The sun was setting as I walked across the bridge to Douglas Island. I pulled my mom-knit woolen scarf around my neck as an Autumn Alaskan chill set in. The clear evening sky was already teaming with stars, and whisps of sun-painted colors were popping across the arcing celestial plane. So I popped a Solar Flare edible of my own, saved for just this moment.
It was fully dark by the time I’d hiked away from the city lights and found what seemed to be the right clearing, on the right hill, right where I could finally stretch out on my sleeping bag unhindered… the cannabis cookies and the sky show were just beginning to peak perfectly together. I opened my eyes wide, and my mind wider, and let the dance of electrons from the solar-flared fingertips of the Sun mingle with Solar Flare medicinal magic in my bloodstream… allowing myself to be the vehicle through which the universe perceived itself as beautiful… and let it all go.
When I woke up the next morning, still blissed out with dreams of cotton rainbows and white shag rugs, I found myself cuddling a small sleeping albino Polar Bear at the grassy bottom of an off season ski slope. The box of emptied canna-cookies lodged between its sharp smiling teeth.
It was going to be an interesting journey home…
