Ravishing Light: A Solar Videopoem (1½ min)

direct link: Ravishing Light: A Solar Videopoem

After watching many hours of NASA's amazing SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) footage of the sun at the Internet Archives, I downloaded some short videos and from them distilled the clips you see in this video. I am delighted to find this footage and to create a solar videopoem.

A vision of such power that what went before falls away in a rapturous death. A rapturous death of the ego. An unerasable enlightenment. That Rubicon. I was inspired to write this piece after seeing the movie, 'Sunshine,' which also uses footage from NASA's SOHO Observatory.

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prose poem written in 2007

These are the videos I finally chose and downloaded. I used clips from some of them for my short videopoem: 

wave- archive.org/details/CIL-10079
SOHO_TRACE_Intro_YouTube- archive.org/details/GMM-10421
recon- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIPreconSTRIP
quiet20010310ntscarchive- archive.org/details/SVS-2766?start=4.5
EITflameszm- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIPEITflameszmSTRIP
304blow- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIP304blowSTRIP
archive.org/details/SVS-3286
EITbulb- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIPEITbulbSTRIP
flarezoom640x480- archive.org/details/SVS-2496
helio_fleet_v1.1- archive.org/details/SVS-3570

                                                        

Erica's 'Dance Our Way Home'

The theme was Amaterasu, Japanese goddess of the sun, a retreat to and emergence from our caves. In the slivers of mirrors we saw ourselves and we enjoyed our shining. We mirrored each others' beauty. Did we become luminous beings by the end of the day of the dance of the shining?

Our sun-wings spread like sun beams caressing the air and we flew as angels of light, I am sure of it.

Everyone's skin was fragile, luminous. Didn't matter what age we were, or size, or what life has carved on us.

Did our eyes shine delicately lit radiating out to illumine the world?

I saw the women's eyes shining; I saw them enlightening the world with their woman-wisdom, their wily smiles, their open-flowered red hearts. I saw their curvaceous dances, their plunging depths, the way they flung themselves into ecstatic states from which they would never emerge, never, if life was composed of the harmonious flowing energies of the dancefloor.

The unwinding from the tight to the relaxed was like approaching an apex and once you reach it you fly. With your feet, your hands, your twirling torso, your wildly swinging hips.

We flaunt it. Our tulle and taffeta and silk and microfibre; pinks and greens and purples and blacks; yogic symbols and alpine wild flowers. Hot breath; luminous, damp and streaming.

In the dance we are embedded in the broad sweeping swaths of sun as she revolves around the planet illumining the world as she goes, spreading rays of wisdom like falling petals of light from the crown of the thousand-petaled lotus that she wears.

We are. In our quiet ways. Or exhibitionist. Or wildly celebrating. Deep. Rich in our sorrow. Visions. Glimmering. Sparkling. Bedazzled. Radiant. Luscious.

Dancing at Erica's Dance Our Way Home (DOWH) is very sweet.




Many thanks...





Beautiful Erica Ross leading a prayer for peace at a DOWH session.


A video created during a short post-DOWH dance at Summer Solstice where my voiceover was this poem:

Composite SOHO image of the Sun

"This composite image combines EIT images from three wavelengths (171Å, 195Å and 284Å) into one that reveals solar features unique to each wavelength. Since the EIT images come to us from the spacecraft in black and white, they are color coded for easy identification. For this image, the nearly simultaneous images from May 1998 were each given a color code (red, yellow and blue) and merged into one." SOHO Gallery: Best of SOHO

The very best image of the sun, and it's nearly a decade old! What was I doing 10 years ago? Oh -?! Gasp. Never mind. SOHO's sun of three-wavelengths was far better.

Coronal Loops

encrypted prose poem