There’s nothing else to talk about than the eclipse. Since 2017, I’d been dreaming about and planning to travel to the path of totality with my children in 2024.
The total solar eclipse lived up to the hype: the air got cold, stars came out, crickets chirped. But most of all I looked up at the place where the sun usually is and just saw a hole with magnificent light bursts all around. The light was bluey silver instead of yellow, like dusk but from above.
I can’t describe it better than Annie Dillard’s essay Total Eclipse.
(The essay first appeared in Teaching a Stone to Talk. The Atlantic republished it in full, but I think it’s behind a paywall. If you find a way to access it to share, please include it in the comments.)
“I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.”
Likewise, pictures of a total eclipse do not capture even the visual effect – and certainly not the full body experience. But I just have to share these images my aunt, Britta Schaa, took with special lenses on Monday.
When we took our glasses off in totality, we all gasped in amazement and awe. We soaked in those few minutes of this planet as we have never seen it.
Then the light came back so brightly! The diamond ring effect - the first flash of the sun’s bright light - was so jarring after being without the sunlight even for that short time. And quickly we put the glasses back on.
Karen Kaplan of the LA Times, wrote about the upcoming eclipse and the way awe changes us. “To hear Herodotus tell it, a total solar eclipse in 585 BC ended a five-year war between ancient kingdoms in present-day Turkey.”
I’ve preached a lot on awe and wonder recently, as well as written about it. Unfortunately for our world, Monday’s few minutes of wonder did not bring war to an end, or even a pause in online bickering. And while the science is clear that awe causes us to feel a closer connection to one another, we have to be open to it.
More power to the eclipse chasers. I’m so glad I chased this one!
But what can truly change the world is all of us who are open to being transformed by feeling wonder at all the regular things around us – especially one another.
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~What I’m reading~
A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny