December 2025 Sage Challenge Results

 

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Under a Half Moon

By Ed Johnson

The men of the village gather outside the dead man’s house. Some lean against their pickup trucks while others huddle around a garbage barrel, its trash lit on fire on a nippy summer night. They drink Coors beer and some smoke Marlboros.

The boy wanders in and his father immediately shoos him.
“Go home, son. This is no place for you.”

The boy, having never been to a wake, hesitates, then heeds, walking past the dead man’s home. Through the large window he sees the women of the village inside clutching the beads of their rosaries and praying in solemn rhythm.

He takes the long way home, along the creek’s edge, and comes upon the girl, her knees drawn, her face buried as she sits. He decides to spin away but she spies him and he feels he should say something.
“I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Don’t matter,” she says.
“You know, my mom died a few years ago.”
“It’s not the same. ”
“I know, but … ”
“It’s not the same.”

He should go, he thinks, but for some reason he sits. She doesn’t seem to notice as she focuses instead on the half moon peeking through a wisp of a cloud.

“It’s funny,” the boy says, “to think that two men are walking on the moon as we sit here.”
“I’m going to be an astronaut,” the girl says.
“Girls can’t be astronauts.”
“Yes we can,” she says matter of factly.
“You gotta be a fighter pilot first and girls can’t be fighter pilots.”
“Yes we can.”
I’m making matters worse, the boy thinks, but as he readies to leave, her voice, with no hint of being offended, stops him.
“See over there? That’s Ursa Major, the large bear. And that way is Virgo.”

“You know your stars.”
“My dad taught me. He said it was a way to find where you are if you get lost. But I think he just liked looking at the lights.”
“I’m sorry about your dad.”
“You already said.”
“I know. I just … “
“See that tree?” the girl asks, pointing at a large cottonwood across the creek. “That’s where I found him. The rope was around his neck and at first I didn’t realize it was him. His face was twisted and red.”

The boy starts to say he’s sorry one more time, but stops himself.

“I started screaming at him,” she says. “I was so mad. Why does somebody do that? Why did he do that?”
The boy looks for the big bear in the sky, then settles on the half moon.

“The world changed forever today,” the boy says.

“No,” the girl says. “The world didn’t change. It was us. We changed the world.”

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THE MESSAGE

by Larry Kilham

Things weren’t going my way.

Despondent, I looked out over the nighttime lake

when high in the sky

a meteorite appeared.

Glittering and incandescent

it slowly sank into the lake

leaving behind a sparkling trail

and bringing a message of hope to me

from the universe.

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Astronomical Inspiration from the Pleiades

 by Wanda Whittlesey-Jerome

I am an early thirty-something in 1986. I stand at my university’s registrar’s window. It’s time to sign up for fall classes. Because my major requires a heavy load of electives, I need one. Yes, I enjoy music and dancing. Yes, I want excitement. Bottom line? I want to help people. And I want a career. But I need another elective right now. No math – please! No need for foreign language. French is my love. Chemistry … been there, done that. Not well, I might add, but I survived. Biology … slicing pickled bugs and earthworms? Did it. Ugh. Truly not my cup of tea. So, let’s try something different. What about astronomy? It looks interesting. No math I hope. I sign up.

This would be a decision that changed how I viewed my life forever. But not in the way one might imagine.

Accumulating college credits toward a Bachelor of Social Work degree, students must complete internships in their field of practice. This semester my schedule had me work the overnight shift in what we, in 1986, called a battered women’s shelter out in semi-rural north Texas. Tough environment. Tough internship. Seconds counted – often in the middle of the night. Peoples’ lives were in danger. Their outcomes? Many were questionable and/or unknown. Life consisted of one emergency after emergency, sometimes occurring simultaneously. Stress and anxiety were my constant companions when in the field.

Weeks passed. Astronomy did have math; fortunately, this introductory course only delved into a small sampling of tools and methods for measurement. Soon the semester neared conclusion. After struggling with my classroom assignments, I needed some fun. On a chilly December evening just before finals week, we met for class in a field north of town on the grounds of a deserted military base. Our professor lined up small telescopes aimed at the night sky. We took turns looking at a star cluster he identified as The Pleiades.

What happened next surprised me to the extent that I remember what I saw and how I felt – even today in 2025. I moved my face toward the scope and felt my eyelashes brush the lens. Slowly the star cluster began to form. Fuzzy bluish in color, it looked like the Big Dipper but much smaller, surrounded by tons of tiny stars. It sparkled aliveness!

Our professor told us this cluster of stars existed over 400 light years away from the earth. That meant that their light had traveled more than 400 years at the speed of light to get to where we were then – in 1986 – or over 180,000 miles per second for 400 earth years! I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea. They were so far yet seemed very near. I wanted to reach out and touch every fiery point of light as they flickered and danced before my eyes. As he spoke about how what we were seeing through these lenses happened long, long ago … it hit me. A wave of awareness washed into my still somewhat youthful mind.

These stars have been up there for a really long time and they are still there. And they will be there long after I’m gone, I thought to myself. Then I considered, My little world of putting out fire after fire in the shelter, each second a bang-pow of craziness and fear, panic and worry … none of it matters up there … none of it matters up there … they just go on and on.

 My breathing slowed. My pulse quieted. My brow? No frown. A moment unlike most those days flooded my physical body. Time stood still for me. It stopped. Immediately, I knew I’d been changed by the experience. And all I could think about? Those lovely stars up there and how they would continue to shine and shine and shine – through generations and generations of humanity. And how my little world down here of hustle and bustle and deadlines and grades and feelings and decisions – how it really didn’t matter all that much in the long run.

That moment informed how I worked throughout my career with people in crisis – as well as how I handled crises in my own life. Yes, when life closed in on vulnerable unfortunate human beings – time, each second, was precious. So, when faced with chaos and disaster, I consciously thought back to the stars that night. Remembering how I saw them from a different perspective absolutely made a difference in my ability to be prepared to handle whatever would come my way. I evolved into a better helper for this illuminating astronomical experience.

Best of all, I got a glimpse from the stars of another reality – a view that I would often recall to stoke my gratitude for the simple joys of living here on planet Earth. And I learned not to take myself too seriously, for I know in my heart and mind The Pleiades will continue to be there – shining brightly, calling us to remember how small and insignificant, and yet how important we may really be – and I imagine they’ll sparkle up there for a long, long time to come.

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Footprints in the Sky

By Dita Dow

A wise old man once told me that the stars aren’t just lights in the sky; they’re footprints, traces left by wandering spirits, the old desert walkers who roamed into the night when darkness was still new to the world.

If you look long enough, he said, you can follow the paths they traveled: north toward the towering mountains, south across the gentle valleys, east into the newborn glow of dawn, and west where the sun sinks and the heavens begin again.

He said the spirits walked not on sand or stone, but on the dark skin of the sky itself. With every step they pressed fire into the heavens, teaching the constellations how to burn and giving direction to travelers who were yet to come.

Every wandering spirit, he said, leaves a mark, lighting the way for those who follow. And ever since, I’ve seen the sky a little differently.

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    Starstruck

by Sam Moorman

Star shine scatters, right?
So how did one spotlight
the way of three Wise Men to Bethlehem?
Like a laser . . .but not invented yet.

Whatever . . . Faithful eyes
telescope to garden skies
where stars twinkle like sequins
adorning shell-backs of wobbling snails

Or the hard brights are daylight shards
winking through canvas pinholes
of night’s big top tent
flapping in solar wind

Or blinking stars are camera
flashings of cosmic reporters
recording Earthly news
from circling ships

Or night’s brights are boat lights
bobbing retinal seas of dreaming eyes
whose synapse sparks
delight canopied lids

Far as musings stray from fixed lights
yet truth navigates by scoped brights

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THE RINGS OF EARTH

By Heidi Marshall

 On the night of her eighth birthday, June 15 of the tenth year of the Third Millenium, she stepped outside her home to look at the stars, but stormy clouds had shuttered the view. Wind whipped her hair in long strands over her face. She liked storms: the wind, the anxious murmurs of the roiling clouds, and the crackling lightning. A deep rumble in the clouds made her look up again, and she saw the layers of clouds begin to separate and leave a widening tunnel through which she could see the sky. Suddenly, a shadow appeared like a huge, colorless rainbow arching against the background of stars. A soft glow rippled through the shadow like starlight coming through.

That was the first time she saw the ring of Earth.

She ran back into the house to tell her family, eyes luminous with wonder.

They all rushed out to look, and they saw only a cloudless sky filled with stars.

They laughed. “A ring! Made of what? Candy?”

She looked up at the ring again.

“Words,” she answered. They laughed harder.

Her eyes dimmed, and years later when she saw the ring again, never told anyone, because now there were two rings.

In her old age, near the end of her time, she saw the rings for the last time.

She saw all the Words spoken, circling the Earth. So many words uttered by humans, from ancestral grunts to the millions of voices exhaling words into the air every second of every day, all carrying their weight: Angry, Sad, Demanding, Soothing; Hateful words and words of Love; the Poems and Songs. And words of Prayer for every occasion, every need, in every language ever spoken. Countless beseeching words reaching out, searching for the ears of deities.

 In her dying day, she assured the family at her side, “the Ring exists.”

And again, they asked what it was made of.

“Words,” she said. “The ring you cannot see.”

“The one you can see is Waste.”

 They haven’t opened their inner eyes to see the Words; but the Waste they can see. People believe the ring is part of Earth, like a ring of Saturn. An ancient legend says that it was created by humans, but no one believes in legends. Leo Gray, one of her descendants, a Physics professor turned astronaut, and newly assigned Ambassador to Mars, had been allowed to read the centuries-old archives of the accidental origin of the ring ––a fact known only to a few selected people of each generation. Waste, like the ubiquitous and seemingly eternal plastics, had already filled every natural and man-made storage space on Earth. Waste, called Trash for generations until Ara Bella, the last human Pope before artificial intelligence took over the role, had decreed the word infamous, never to be uttered again—which did nothing to solve the storage problem. The only solution was the immeasurable Space beyond Earth’s gravity.

 For a long time, scientists had been testing ways of sending Waste to space. The most successful method, still in use with some modifications, was to grind the Waste into miniscule particles, then fuse them into the thinnest disks possible and precisely six feet in diameter. Those were placed in transparent containers to be disposed of beyond the Earth’s gravity.

But the leading cargo spaceship malfunctioned and exploded before reaching that point. The following spaceships were destroyed seconds after when he tsunami-like impact of the explosion reached them. The bundles came apart. The Waste disks cascaded out and imprisoned by gravity formed a ring that slowly began to orbit the planet. From Earth’s surface, it looked like a necklace made of sequins, invisible by day, softly iridescent in the night.

 After long deliberations, the World Waste Disposal Commission decided that Waste should be processed as usual, and the disks ejected to join the orbiting ring. It would be less costly than sending it past the reach of Earth’s gravity.

Over time, the ring grew denser. Scientists predicted the orbit would get closer to Earth. Instead, the Waste ring grew thick tendrils that began to wrap the Earth in rings of Waste.

Physicists and astronomers kept trying to find a way to free the Earth of its rings before it was destroyed for lack of sunlight, or a yet unknown cataclysmic event caused by Waste. They didn’t find a way but discovered long undulations in deep space that seemed to start near the Inner planets and disappear into the Sun’s glare. They called the phenomenon Solar Worm Hole.

 And still no one else had seen the ring of Words. Until Leo.

 From space, Leo Gray watches the Waste rings and shakes his head at the brain-melting assignment the Commission had loaded on him: Find an opening to the Solar Worm Hole.

He sat forward in his seat, elbows on his knees, and rubbed his face hard. He needed to rest. He leaned back on the seat and closed his eyes.

In that instant, between wakefulness and sleep, his Inner eyes opened. Like his ancestor, he saw the Word ring, with more words joining in an uninterrupted stream. But he also saw Words, like sunlit sparks, spiraling away from the ring to disappear into nothingness.

 The Words had found the opening!

With his new inner vision, he saw that no matter how much Waste they sent to be incinerated by the Sun, humans could no more stop creating Waste than stopping Words from being said.

With perfect clarity, he saw the Earth in the unimaginable future, still orbiting the Sun, shed of its rings, empty of humans. Beautiful beyond words.

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The Bucket List Item I Almost Checked Twice

By Rosa B. Armijo-Pemble

Not always imprisoned in the far northern skies, history has shown that the northern lights can shed their glittering bounds for heated adventures. May 2024, at the peak of the solar maximum (the peak of the Sun’s 11-year cycle marked by heightened magnetic activity), the aurora borealis surged far beyond its usual realm, towards the United Kingdom and parts of Asia, and swept unusually south across the United States and Mexico.

These auroras unveiled some of their most intense, color-rich splendors—curtains and ripples drifted like warm breath released into a cold winter, to mark one of the strongest auroral displays ever recorded.

Draped across wide vistas, the luminous flares that wandered over at least fifteen states offered a rare celestial dance. From Alaska to New York, spectators watched a star-woven wonder. Purples, greens, blues, and reds, born of charged particles sent from the sun, raced at high speeds to then collide with gas molecules in Earth’s atmosphere. These collisions created the spectacular glow, with each color dependent on altitude and the type of gas the particles basically smashed into.

Fickle creatures, the auroras’ limited engagements and most majestic demonstrations are typically reserved for the coldest realms—remote edges of the Arctic Circle. Few beings can easily journey such distances to view the lights as experienced in nations like Finland, Iceland, or Norway, especially in the coldest months of the year. Fortunate for those who longed for the awe-inspiring moment as their dream came true when the auroras moved closer for many to place a mark on their bucket list.

Early November 2025, the opportunity to behold the splendor of the northern lights appeared once again. This time, however, many relied more heavily on technology as cell phones pointed skyward to snap more vivid images than the human eye could see.

Although this phase is expected to begin to decline early 2026, which leads toward the next solar minimum—a quieter period—the official end will not be declared until several months of continuous low activity has been studied. While the most intense phase may have already passed, only time will tell when solar activity has truly settled.

Despite its beauty, the phenomenon remains partly a mystery. Known is that it originates some 94 million miles from Earth, shaped by instabilities in the Sun’s magnetic field. This ethereal curiosity not only enchants the mind, but some swear they have heard a whisper within the luminosity—a soft crackle or hiss—as the aurora coaxes charged particles downward into the colder layers near the ground.

Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and father of modern science, was marveled by these veins of stunning color and sought a name worthy of such a monumental event in the heavens. Galileo’s Aurora Borealis stems from Aurora, the Roman bringer of dawn, and Boreas, the Greek north wind whose breath swirls the stars.

Last year, my son and I lingered in the Missouri night, to catch a glimpse of this heavenly show, one I’d always wanted to travel far to photograph. I must admit, we surrendered to sleep too soon, only to wake to the morning’s chorus of messages—news that, had we held on just a few hours, we would have witnessed the great spectacle that made it our way as we slept. A moment slipped past, my Bucket List no shorter for it.

This second time around, one of those first nights of November, my son was able to capture many images with the use of his cell phone —framed in the doorway of his Missouri home—and stream images across the miles to me in New Mexico. Inspired to have our own turn, the next evening my husband and I drove up to the Belen mesa, hoping the height would lift us above Albuquerque’s light pollution. When the long day and cold night begun to take a toll, we decided the slim percentage of an aurora sighting wasn’t worth the endeavor. Once again, many were able to get a peek, however, they were situated in better locations.

Until I can trek the distance to the edges of the Earth to photograph the northern lights on their home turf, I will cherish the images my son shared from his first encounter. One day, I will fulfill two long-held dreams at once: journey to foreign lands and see the aurora borealis in all its brilliance, on its home turf.

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