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Apr 25, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik

I like to think of the slight movement of the air before dawn as the slow breathing of the sleeping earth before it wakes up.

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Apr 22, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik

regarding northern lights - Kp number gives you an idea of how active the storm is. you'll want to find your Kp number. i dropped a link at the bottom. for example, i'm in montana and most of montana is between 5 and 7. so if my alert tells me its a 5 (or above) im gonna head out.

now, this is likely the best tip the gatekeepers dont want you to know - if you dont see the lights, get out your phone (or your fancy camera if you have one). set your shutter speed to 20-30 seconds (most phones will let you do this manually). hold your phone (pointed at the north horizon) as steady as possible (or use a fancy tripod) and take a photo. what you cant see with your eyes, your phone might see with the long shutter speed.

https://softservenews-6eg3vi45jxatmx1gteg.stackpathdns.com/globeNW_big2.gif

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I know exactly what you mean!! The stillness of the morning is amazing - and there is a current in the stillness. I feel it sometimes too, before sunrise. I call it "the flow of the universe" but who knows if it has a name. I pray I always have the opportunity to feel it. And to eat gooseberries. And to sit and watch ducks swim or eagles fly or a tiny butterfly land on a dew drop.

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Apr 18, 2022·edited Apr 19, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik

“Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.” Maybe what the experiment is testing is just us, period. As in, undergoing trial or facing a dilemma: really being *tested*. Who are we? What do we stand for? Do we even know all of this is a test?

Technically your not-breeze is "calm air" (<1 mph) or "light air" (1-3), but that doesn't sound very poetic. Yours are better. How about "Hour of the Wolf" air? There could probably be an interesting book or essay written about the aesthetic gaps in our language for more specific gradations of various quantifiable phenomena and their related qualitative sensory experiences than are normally acknowledged or measured, yet everyone is intimately familiar with. Having the fidelity of your thermal data suddenly reduced by 1.8 is one of the great frustrations of the Celsius scale when you move to Canada, and I'm sure language compensates for this - but maybe not entirely? I guess the famous example would be Eskimos having 20 different terms for types of snow whereas we only have a few (although I guess that's based more on material/physical distinctions than quantity or measurement per se).

And then, there could be another chapter in that book about specific gradations of purely qualitative phenomena, like degrees of "tip-of-the-tongue" experience. Not to mention, different levels of discernment. People who endured starvation probably notice smaller increments of hunger and have better language for it, than those who haven't. When I'm grading student papers, the increments I'm allowed to choose for different grades definitely impacts my judgments about degrees of quality in their performance, or why exactly a certain criterion deserves more. Really experienced graders can probably feel the difference between an 82 and an 84. But would they be able to describe it?

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