change the way you travel, change the way you live
Hi! My name is Eden, and if you’re reading this, you’ve stumbled on my travel blog. My goal with this blog is to share stories of my travels with you and also to inspire you to find magic and meaning in the world around you …
I’m writing today from a tiny town on the coast of Maine, where the ocean constantly crashes against the shore and Milky Way scatters handfuls of glitter across the sky each night. Far from the raging smog of the city, this little slice of land …
ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2022, Russian troops descended on the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine. The defunct power plant—still undergoing cleanup and decommissioning—was overtaken by the invaders and the employees held hostage. By the end of March, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed that Russian troops have pulled …
Hi! My name is Eden, and if you’re reading this, you’ve stumbled on my travel blog. My goal with this blog is to share stories of my travels with you and also to inspire you to find magic and meaning in the world around you …
It’s 3:17 AM as I write this. I’ve become extremely nocturnal since coming to Berlin. Yesterday, August 1, was Lammas, the harvest festival in the pagan wheel of the year. Lammas is a celebration of grain, and of nourishment. In some traditions it’s about honoring …
We left early, beginning the drive up the Maine coast when the sun was still new. I discovered Camp Etna on a whim, in a bookstore I semi-believe is enchanted because I’ve found so many extraordinary books there (it’s Sherman’s Books in Damariscotta, Maine, perhaps …
Last night, we built a fire on the rocks by the sea to celebrate the summer solstice. Old wood and shredded pizza boxes were thrown together, a flame was lit, and soon the fire was roaring upwards, spitting smoke and sparks. As the sun set, …
I’m writing today from a tiny town on the coast of Maine, where the ocean constantly crashes against the shore and Milky Way scatters handfuls of glitter across the sky each night. Far from the raging smog of the city, this little slice of land …
(Sidenote: this article makes me nostalgic because it’s one of the first pieces of travel writing I ever wrote!) Countless poets have wandered New York’s streets. From Federico García Lorca’s lonely adventures in Columbia University subway stations to Allen Ginsberg’s hallucinations on the Upper West Side to Walt Whitman and …
Looking to do some urban exploration? Look no further than these eerie, dilapidated gems, located in our very own NYC. As the weather warms, you may find yourself longing for some adventures. And what’s more thrilling, nostalgic, and atmospheric than a journey through an abandoned …
Rewilding is typically defined as the process of restoring devastated or developed areas back to their natural states, letting nature take over. From the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park to the natural redevelopment of nuclear disaster zones, rewilding is a powerful way to …
ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2022, Russian troops descended on the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine. The defunct power plant—still undergoing cleanup and decommissioning—was overtaken by the invaders and the employees held hostage. By the end of March, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed that Russian troops have pulled …
Last night, we built a fire on the rocks by the sea to celebrate the summer solstice. Old wood and shredded pizza boxes were thrown together, a flame was lit, and soon the fire was roaring upwards, spitting smoke and sparks.
As the sun set, stars began to come out. I’ve seen true dark skies across the western United States, where some of the darkest skies in the world twinkle and radiate — I’ve watched the stars through the sunroof of my Jeep in the heart of the Badlands while wolves howled outside — but honestly, I’ve never seen anything like the Maine skies on a moonless night.
After the fire was made, we lay down to watch the stars. Far from being a still and alien graveyard of old light, as the starry sky can be when you merely glance at it instead of really taking in what you’re seeing, the sky seemed especially alive that night. Pinprick satellites criss-crossed the constellations, the wandering eyes of states across the world slipping through the Big Dipper and twining around Orion’s Belt.
For most of my life, like many others, I’ve been lucky if I see a star or two at all. Come to think of it, most of the nights of my life have been spent inside. The skies above Brooklyn are often ominously red or a wan yellow, the result of clotted layers of smog and silt, and it’s the same with San Francisco. But in Maine you can often see the Milky Way in all its blue radiance, thrown across the sky like a handful of glitter cast into the ether by a careless god.
Light pollution is a growing problem across the world. Resulting from an excess of artificial light, this form of pollution (like all forms of pollution) is becoming increasingly oppressive. Over the past 100 years, our skies have become halls of mirrors, reflections of our own desire to crush the natural darkness around us. Light pollution threatens ecosystems, disrupts circadian rhythms, leads to increased anxiety and mental illness, and wastes energy, to name a few consequences.
Plus, light pollution prevents us from seeing the stars. It’s yet another wall we’ve placed between ourselves and nature, yet another prison we’ve constructed for ourselves to keep the beauty we were born into at arms’ length. It’s not as if this is our fault as individuals — we’re being sold addictive products that keep us hooked on cycles of consumption and that make it all too easy to ignore the natural world and each other, and I’m as guilty of anyone of staring at the blue light of my phone until the sun begins to rise.
In our world of perpetual artificial luminescence, it’s easy to forget that every time we stare up at the sky, we are staring at an unfathomably intricate tapestry of galaxies. The deepest image ever taken of the far universe is the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field. If you take that image and extrapolate it over the whole sky, it results in an estimated ~170 billion galaxies in the observable universe. But new simulations are telling us that there may be 2 to 20 trillion galaxies, perhaps (and in my opinion, undoubtedly) even more.
In short, space goes on and on, far further than the edges of what our minds can comprehend. And much of it is alive. It’s inherently divine in that alone, I believe, in its huge brightness. Just look at those little galaxies — each tiny spark indicative of a blazing universe. Who are we to say what’s out there, or that we know anything at all?
I know contemplating the sheer size of the universe makes some people feel afraid, but I’ve always found the universe’s size very comforting. It means we are held in a much bigger sequence of events than we know. I can’t quite explain why, but to me, it means we don’t have to fixate so much on our own egos; we can rest in the vast nest of stars we were born into.
Anyways, we were watching the sky and I was thinking these kinds of thoughts, and moving to escape huge clouds of smoke from the bonfire as the wind changed, and listening to the sighs of the ocean. And I was speculating about aliens, as one does — my personal theory about them is that they are definitely out there, but maybe they’re far larger or far smaller than we can comprehend, or maybe they’re somehow invisible to the human eye, existing on a plane or emitting a frequency our brains can’t pick up, or something like that, though I haven’t ruled out the possibility of eventual contact — when all of a sudden, an orange streak started moving across the sky.
There are a lot of shooting stars in Maine. Normally, you’re lucky if you see one or two each night, and they’re impossibly fast, short and faint, just little ephemeral flickers in the night; blink and you’ll miss them.
Technically speaking, shooting stars are actually meteoroids, or space rocks that burn when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, and their trails are called meteorites. Meteor showers can occur when our planet passes through a trail of fragments and shards left by comets, which scientists believe are remnants of the solar nebula, or tangled body of interstellar clouds, that formed the sun. (The term nebula was originally used to describe galaxies outside the Milky Way; spiral-shaped galaxies were called spiral nebulae, and don’t even get me started on how spirals occur in galaxies and also in certain weather patterns, shells, and sunflowers, and how we are microcosms of the macrocosm, and so forth).
What I saw that night was a fire-colored, diamond-shaped streak that covered half the sky and lingered there for at least a whole second. It was the width of about six stars stacked on top of each other; for a moment it looked like the sky had been slashed open by some cosmic claw, letting a fiery parallel universe slip through. At the front of the streak was a single, massive object that resembled a star but was something else entirely, something both broken and radiant.
Then, that object flared out and broke into two gigantic gleaming, shining wholes. For a brief moment I wondered if this was it, if this was the asteroid that was going to come destroy us all, if the sky was about to fall, if anyone else was seeing this.
And then the twin stars winked out, and all of it was gone, and the sky was a humming mass of satellites and airplanes and stars once more. I’ve never seen anything like it, and probably will never see anything like it again. Any other night I would have missed it, would have been inside caught up inside the screen dimension.
But that’s how it so often is with these things; blink and you’ll miss them. That’s a core part of my best traveling advice, and possibly my central life motto: Bring yourself somewhere beautiful, open your eyes, take a breath, and wait. Watch for synchronicities (seeing a massive flame-like streak cut through the night of Litha, a holiday that is often celebrated with fire, feels like one to me). Open up the possibility that you might encounter something magical. Be open to anything, and everything.
Magic is everywhere. Sometimes we have to turn off the lights and sit in the dark for a while to find it. The sublime is everywhere. It’s above our heads, it’s in the people around us we take for granted, it’s in us. We just have to be there to see it.