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The aircraft shuddered as the wheels touched the slippery runway in Reykjavik. It was dark outside with a silver glimmer around the horizon. As far as my eyes could make out everything was white and covered with snow. I had flown halfway across the world in search of the Aurora Borealis, better known as "The Northern Lights”, a name attributed to their association with the high latitude regions where they are most visible. My fascination had grown as travel journals and magazines published essays on the phenomenon that was the result of charged particles from the sun entering the Earth's atmosphere and releasing light as they lost this energy. Of course, I had thought to myself, I will book a flight, pack my snow boots, go see it and call it a trip. This naive conviction would make me chuckle later. The tour started in a few hours when my cheery tour guide Ragnhildur “Ragga” picked me up and showed me around the capital. Dressed in an Icelandic sweater characterized by the pattern around the neck, Ragga put my six layers of thermals and sweaters to shame. As I took in the barely there crowd around town, my thoughts kept going back to the northern lights. The first night, we drove to the outskirts of the city and waited in the middle of a pitch black field. There was a diffused buzz in the air, throngs of people standing, sitting, all looking up at the sky. There were no lights that night. The Aurora Borealis could evade the most well-planned, meticulous and experienced of travelers. A clear sky, high activity at the sun and healthy dose of luck as catalyst seemed to be the master players for a fine show. As we drove to the small town of Hella, to set up camp in wooden cabins, Ragga told stories about the grey stony mountains, elves and Celtic fairies. They were all true she implored. Despite the Icelandic beauty all around me, all I really wanted to witness was the spectacle in the sky. Every night as my compatriots sat with their wine bottles and then headed to bed as they became empty, I volunteered to stay awake and keep watch. I promised everyone I would bang their doors, the moment the first sparkle appeared in the sky. I wrote notes, read books and slept only when the clouds would take over the sky because that meant there would be no northern lights. I didn’t expect to find my acceptance of nature so humbling. As I waited each night I realized how despite my best efforts and precise plan to travel to the place where the Aurora Borealis happened frequently, it did not in any way promise my being able to see it. Surprisingly, the journey at no point felt futile, there wasn't a choice but to graciously accept. It felt enormous, the understanding of how the universe has it own pace and I was just a tiny fragment floating in it. A high energy particle on some days and trying to gain speed on others. On my last night in Reykjavik, I contemplated as I packed my bag. The tour was over and I hadn’t been able to see the lights. I had twelve hours to kill before my flight when I decided to take a cruise. The kind that gives you a fluorescent hot water bodysuit to wear and then parks itself a few miles away from the city lights while you wait for the magic. As I stood at the deck of the boat, warm because of the bodysuit and cold because I was convinced my nose had frozen and would fall off any moment, there was a sudden lull in the noise followed by exponentially rising hysteria. As I looked up at the sky, before me was the most extravagant light show on display. It wasn’t green but purple and orange and all the colors in one. It was dynamic and unconfined. It flowed from one direction to the other. I don’t know if it lasted two minutes or twenty, all I remember is that nature had delivered and how. The lights had finally found me.